Most biopics try to cram an entire life into two hours. Tony, A24’s new film about Anthony Bourdain, does the opposite, and it is a considerably better movie for it. Directed by Matt Johnson, the filmmaker behind Blackberry, the film opened in limited release in New York and Los Angeles on August 7th and expands to theaters nationwide on August 21st, and it never once shows the version of Bourdain most audiences actually know, the tattooed television host narrating his way through kitchens and street markets around the world. Instead, it plants itself entirely inside the summer of 1975, when Bourdain was a brash, insecure nineteen year old who had just washed out of Vassar and had no idea yet that food would become his life’s work.

A Coming of Age Story, Not a Career Retrospective

The film draws its material from the early chapters of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s 2000 memoir, focusing squarely on the summer he took a grueling job washing dishes and cooking at the Flagship restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. That single summer, long before culinary school, long before Brasserie Les Halles, long before any television camera ever pointed at him, is where Tony locates the moment Bourdain actually fell for professional kitchen culture, its chaos, its camaraderie, and its total disregard for the polite version of adulthood he had been failing to grow into.

Dominic Sessa, who broke out in The Holdovers, plays the young Bourdain, and critics have specifically praised him for resisting the instinct to soften the character into someone likable from the start. Sessa’s Bourdain, or Tony, as the film calls him, arrives on screen as an arrogant, undisciplined kid, closer to insufferable than charming, long before the leather jacket and the worldly narration audiences would later associate with the name. Antonio Banderas plays Chef, the restaurant owner who becomes the film’s real center of gravity as a mentor figure, with Leo Woodall, Emilia Jones, Rich Sommer, Dagmara Domińczyk, and comedian Stavros Halkias rounding out the kitchen and family that shape Tony’s summer.

Why Critics Have Responded So Strongly

Tony debuted to a rare, nearly perfect critical reception, opening with a 100 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes before settling into the mid to high 90s as more reviews rolled in, an unusually strong showing for a biopic, a genre that critics tend to approach with real skepticism. Reviewers at outlets including Eater, The Atlantic, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter have singled out the film’s refusal to clean up its subject, praising its willingness to show Bourdain as genuinely unpleasant at times rather than smoothing him into an inevitable success story. Several critics have also highlighted Michael Bauman’s cinematography, which renders Provincetown as warm and inviting even as the film keeps most of its action confined to the restaurant’s cramped, high pressure kitchen.

What seems to be resonating most, according to the reviews rolling in, is how little the film actually depends on audiences already knowing who Bourdain became. Several critics have noted that Tony works as a standalone coming of age story about mentorship and self discovery, one that would hold up even for viewers with no familiarity with No Reservations or Parts Unknown, precisely because it never leans on the audience’s hindsight to generate emotional weight. Instead, the film bets entirely on a single summer, a single mentor, and a kid who does not yet know what he is about to become, a much narrower and, according to early reception, considerably more effective story than the sweeping career retrospective a more conventional biopic might have attempted.