Tony (2026)
Matt Johnson wants you to forget who Tony Bourdain becomes. For most of this movie, he nearly succeeds.
The picture opens on a kid selling a fellowship committee on a novel that doesn’t exist yet (a Kerouac-meets-Orwell fever dream he can barely pronounce the words of). He doesn’t get the money. He follows a girl to Provincetown instead, and lands, more or less by accident, in the kitchen of a seafood shack where the tourists want oysters and nobody particularly cares whether Tony wants to be a writer. That’s the whole plot: a restless Provincetown summer, and a kid who thinks he’s slumming it and doesn’t yet know he’s found the thing he’ll spend the rest of his life circling.
Dominic Sessa plays him as a small, specific kind of insufferable (the sort of nineteen-year-old who’s memorised the vocabulary of authenticity without having earned any of it yet). He’s hard to like. I kept waiting for the film to let me hate him properly, the way you can hate a guy who lies to the woman he’s chasing and lies to his parents about the fellowship he didn’t win, and it never quite let me. That’s down to Sessa; there’s a hunger underneath the posturing that reads as real even when the posturing itself is exhausting to watch. Antonio Banderas, as the chef who runs the place, gets the film’s best trick: he never once explains himself, just lets you watch a disciplined man decide, wordlessly, that this particular idiot might be worth the trouble.
Where the film loses me is in its own comfort. Provincetown, in Johnson’s hands, is all golden light and gentle needle-drops, a summer romance subplot that hits its marks on schedule and never risks anything. It’s postcard-pretty. I found myself admiring the craft of individual scenes (a kitchen fire that Sessa’s Tony sets off through pure incompetence plays as both funny and genuinely mortifying) while feeling the film as a whole settle for the shape of a coming-of-age story rather than the mess of one.
The film knows Bourdain would grow into someone who despised this kind of polish. It seems almost embarrassed by its own prettiness, and yet it keeps reaching for it anyway. There’s a version of this movie that trusts its subject’s own account of himself: a young man Bourdain himself, in the book, called in need of “an ass-kicking,” and lets that ugliness sit on screen a while longer than this one does. Instead it blinks, softens, and cuts to another sunset over the harbour. I left liking the actors more than the film that contained them. That’s its own kind of verdict. It’s a pleasant afternoon at the movies, competently assembled, occasionally sharp; it stops well short of anything that would have made its subject sit up in his chair.