Tony Review: Superb Coming-Of-Age Film

With Tony, his biopic about a transformative summer for a young Anthony Bourdain, Matt Johnson serves up a remarkable coming-of-age story.

Enter Matt Johnson. The Canadian filmmaker has already had a great 2026 thanks to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Now he brings us Tony, a comedy-drama he has co-written with regular partner Matthew Miller (retooling an original story from Todd Bartels and Lou Howe). Johnson’s had success spicing up biographical projects before. 2023’s BlackBerry took a brand biopic about a phone and made it all about failure and hubris. And barring a few moments, Tony avoids the usual biopic tropes. It is a film with an edge, unafraid to portray its protagonist as an asshole, which rejects being broad in favour of focusing on one part of its subject’s life: One transformative summer in 1975.

In that year, Bourdain (Dominic Sessa, of The Holdovers) is a cocky 19-year-old going by the name Tony. Trying to be a writer, he’s so sure he’s earned a summer fellowship to work on a novel that he smugly tells everyone about it. Especially his high school crush Nancy (Emilia Jones, of CODA), who is spending the summer in Provincetown, Cape Cod. When Tony is rejected for that fellowship, he simply lies and says he got it, leading to a spur-of-the-moment decision to leave his family in New Jersey and head to Provincetown to find Nancy. Except she already has a boyfriend, and Tony ends the night thrown out of a restaurant called the Flagship with a black eye for his troubles.

Nevertheless, he comes back the following morning and asks the Flagship’s mysterious Chef (Antonio Banderas, of Pain and Glory) if he can stay on his porch. In exchange, Tony gets a job as a dishwasher at the Flagship. There, he gets close to cook Sal (Leo Woodall, of Tuner) and also the tough but wise Chef. It is under his tutelage that Tony learns to shuck oysters and make Lobster Thermidor, becoming more interested in cooking and changing his life.

Tony is woven from the opening extracts of Bourdain’s memoir “Kitchen Confidential” (though with some embellishments), which detailed his formative years and experiences. It makes this story a bildungsroman, the kind that Tony tries to pitch for his fellowship. At this time, he is an overconfident, deceptive young man with a ‘fake it ‘till you make it’ philosophy and nunchucks tucked into his trousers. Yet there’s a latent rage within him too, seen in the way he punches holes in his room or slams the phone down.

Though by design, the way Tony acts for large swathes of Johnson’s film will not be to everyone’s palate. But it is something Bourdain freely admitted to. “I was – to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” he wrote in “Kitchen Confidential”. It’s a passage that opens Tony and quickly becomes the film’s mission statement as Tony is thrown into the kitchen environment like a lobster into boiling water. Ultimately, he’s got a lot to learn in a summer of hard truths, frequent screw-ups and personal growth.

In terms of the performance, Sessa is doing similar work to his breakout role in The Holdovers, threading a needle between being a youthful smartass and a kid with a sensitive centre. And though Sessa plays the arrogant, awkward, compulsive-lying parts to Tony really well, he also manages to bring enough roguish charm and eventual vulnerability to win you over. It helps that DP Michael Bauman (One Battle After Another) uses close-ups that allow you to register every subtle emotion on Sessa’s face.

Elsewhere, the ensemble cast are all great, from Emilia Jones (though she isn’t given much to do) to Stavros Halkias (Bugonia) and Michael Jibrin (American Fiction) as the Flagship co-workers with big personalities. Leo Woodall steals most of the scenes he’s in as the coke-huffing, trouble-causing womaniser Sal. Then there is Banderas, whose warmth comes through as much as Chef’s care for his craft.

But the key ingredient in this engagingly scrappy film is Johnson, who strives for a real, authentic feeling to this story. The kitchen staff chemistry and chaos are shown in depth, but so are the intensive duties like Chef making his own ketchup. Additionally, Johnson manages to capture a sense of place (Provincetown in the heaving summer months, the parties on the beaches) and time (1975, Jaws at the drive-in theatre and ‘70s rock on the soundtrack).

In the end, Johnson serves up something remarkable with the rounded and complex Tony. It has the easy-going vibes of a hangout movie and is consistently funny. However, at its core, this is a superb coming-of-age tale of a young man with no direction in his life finding himself, his passions and, most importantly, his true name. Tony may have been his preferred name initially. Yet as Chef tells him, Anthony fits him – and what he will become – a lot more.

Tony will be released in UK and Irish cinemas on August 14, 2026. In the U.S., the film was released in select theaters on August 7, 2026 and will be out nationwide on August 21.