'Tony' Movie Review: A Briny Anthony Bourdain Coming-of-Age Comedy - IndieWire

What the report says

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich reviewed “Tony,” an A24 film from Matt Johnson that imagines a young Anthony Bourdain during a formative summer in Provincetown in 1975. The review describes the movie as Johnson’s most direct feature to date: a salty, nostalgic coming-of-age comedy built around a 19-year-old Bourdain before fame as a chef, author and travel-documentary figure.

According to IndieWire, Dominic Sessa plays Tony as a privileged, self-dramatizing Vassar student who talks like an aspiring literary rebel but has not yet earned the life experience he wants to project. After misrepresenting his prospects for a writing fellowship, he follows Nancy, played by Emilia Jones, to Cape Cod, where he soon lands at a restaurant called The Flagship and is forced into dishwasher work after a rough introduction to the local kitchen world.

The review singles out Leo Woodall’s performance as Sal, a volatile and charismatic kitchen worker, and praises Antonio Banderas as Chef, a Portuguese immigrant whose mentorship of Tony is presented with restraint rather than easy sentiment. Ehrlich writes that the film is strongest when it surrounds Tony with working-class restaurant characters who challenge his affectations and expose the distance between the young man and the public figure he will eventually become.

IndieWire is more critical of Nancy’s role, saying the character functions largely in relation to Tony despite her importance to his later life. Overall, the review frames “Tony” as less a conventional biopic than a bittersweet portrait of youthful pretension, humiliation and early culinary awakening.