Tony, the biographical film starring Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain, arrives in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on August 14, with a wider Canadian release following on August 21. Rather than lean on Bourdain's own bestselling memoir as his primary source, director Matt Johnson found his way into the character through a far less obvious text.
That source was Bourdain's introduction to a 2018 reissue of Howard Mitcham's Provincetown Seafood Cookbook, written decades after the events the film covers but revealing, to Johnson, something Kitchen Confidential did not. My feeling is that when he's in his 40s, Johnson said, he is trying to portray himself, in Kitchen Confidential, as the character he wanted people to see, rather than offering the more reflective account that came later once success had given him distance from his own myth.
The film follows a 19 year old Bourdain who loses a writing fellowship at Vassar and, rather than course correct, follows a woman named Nancy, played by Emilia Jones, to Provincetown. There he lands a job as a dishwasher at The Flagship restaurant, working under a head chef named Sal and alongside a coworker played by Stavros Halkias, with Antonio Banderas also part of the kitchen's cast of characters.
What Johnson is chasing across that setup is less a straightforward origin story than a study of the gap between the persona Bourdain built and the person underneath it. Nancy in particular is framed as a formative influence on his early motivation and sense of integrity, long before the writing career and television fame that would come to define him. Sessa carries that tension as a Bourdain still assembling the character the world would eventually meet, guided less by ambition in the moment than by a woman he followed to the edge of the country on a whim.