Anthony Bourdain Would've Hated 'Tony' (2026)

Matt Johnson's biopic about Anthony Bourdain hits the right notes, but offers nothing more.

I’ve been on a huge Matt Johnson kick this summer. For those who don’t know, Matt is the co-creator and co-star of the show Nirvanna The Band The Show which recently had a revival with the aptly named Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie earlier this year.

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Johnson first came to my attention with his 2023 movie Blackberry about the rise and fall of the phone of the same name. This year I finally got around to seeing his prior film, Project Avalanche, a conspiracy thriller about NASA in the 1960s.

Johnson’s films- like the man himself- are characterized by originality, chaotic humor, and, most importantly, an unwillingness to shy away from the real. Now that the show is streaming on Hulu I’ve started watching episodes from the original show and it’s insane the lengths they go through to enact the schemes to play a show at the Rivoli. Every Matt Johnson project has felt like something they got away with; almost like they pranked the studio funding it to make it.

So I was pretty excited for this summer’s release of Tony, about the equally uncompromising, boundary-pushing chef-turned-TV-star Anthony Bourdain. However, when the trailer dropped something felt amiss. Why did this movie from an original director about a very original subject feel so…unoriginal?

I wasn’t sure what to expect, then I ended up working on a movie set (long story) in July with a guy who worked on the film, and although he said he had a great time he couldn’t shake the feeling that Matt was in over his head on this movie.

A commemorative sticker from the Tony shoot, courtesy of the friend I made on set this summer

Tony follows Bourdain (Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa) in his formative years in the summer of 1975 (timestamped by a screening of Jaws the characters stumble through) as he chases a girl to the town of Provincetown in Cape Cod and winds up working in a kitchen there under the supervision of a no-nonsense cook (Antonio Banderas). Bourdain has desires of becoming a writer, with the hope to write a bildungsroman (which he mispronounces), or a coming-of-age story, much like this film itself. It’s during this fateful summer that he not only finds his love for cooking but finds himself, learning that lying won’t get you very far and that blunt, brutal honesty, especially with one’s self, is the best guide in life.

There’s actually a nice undercurrent about Divine Providence (one of the characters mispronounces the name of the town of Provincetown as Providence) as this chance trip to Cape Cod to follow a girl ends up changing his entire life, and the Providence mispronunciation becomes a recurring joke until Bourdain finally learns its meaning at the end. Also, Banderas’ character takes Bourdain to Church with him despite the latter’s objections (“You don’t believe in God? That is like saying you don’t believe in the air you breathe”) ad there’s a great recurring bit where Banderas has zero tolerance for Bourdain’s frequent blasphemy.

However, despite solid ingredients the film just ends up being a nice, paint-by-numbers biopic of a very complicated man. There are allusions to his later drug use and even a conversation about suicide, but it’s brief and almost feels forced as necessary foreshadowing of Bourdain’s future demise. The film’s cinematography from Michael Bauman, fresh off an Oscar nomination for One Battle After Another, feels very different from DP Jared Raab and Johnson’s usual chaotic, zoom-heavy style and it’s a jarring clash. You would never know that Matt Johnson directed this except maybe for the frequent needle-drops.

Reports on the production give an idea of the extent of this “clash”, with Johnson citing a collision between the American studio style and his own freewheeling productions in Canada, which is relatively low on “red tape”:

Johnson had spent years developing an intentionally loose and improvisational filmmaking style on his early DIY films, “Nirvanna the Band the Show,” and eventually “BlackBerry.” “Tony,” however, was a much larger American production, and much of his regular Canadian crew couldn’t join him because of visa red tape and costs. Without that familiar team, Johnson struggled to recreate the spontaneous, experimental approach he had built his career around.

He recalled a perfect Atlantic sunset and wanting to let Leo Woodall and Sessa exist in the moment while the cameras rolled, only to run into the realities of time and money. “It’s not like there was a single person saying, ‘No, you can’t do that,’” Johnson explained. “I mean, sometimes there was. But the kid in me was not invited to set, to use a metaphor.”

The frustration eventually turned into what Johnson described as “complete and total dread.” Near the end of the shoot, an exhausted Johnson was talking through a scene with Stavros Halkias when the comedian pointed out just how palpable his misery had become: “Oh, man, even you can’t make it seem like this is a good situation anymore.”¹

However, as the article points out, Johnson was finally reunited with some of his Nirvanna crew— particularly his editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch and buddy Jay McCarrol for the film’s excellent score— but at this point it must have really just been a salvage job.

At the end of the day, A24 is run by the same kind of executives that any other Hollywood studio has: and they are not going to put out a potential prestige-movie that looks any different from the other prestige-fare out there. There’s just so little room in the American studio system for the kind of wonderful, outside-the-box filmmaking that Johnson is accustomed to.

That’s not to say that the actors don’t give it their all— Antonio Banderas in particular is excellent as Bourdain’s mentor— but they just don’t have much to work with. It’s a fine film, but when you watch Blackberry you will understand what a biopic can and should be. As my friend Dan put it as we escalated down from our Union Square Regal showing in lower Manhattan (one of the few places where the film is currently showing), “I was expecting this to be more punk-rock”.

I would still recommend this as a decent biopic, but don’t expect anything more. Maybe watch Blackberry instead. Or an episode of Parts Unknown.

Tony is currently only playing in NYC and L.A. It will be hitting theaters nationwide on August 21

1. “Matt Johnson Says Making ‘Tony’ Was A Difficult Collision With The American Studio System: ‘Complete And Total Dread’; Calls ‘Heat 2’ A ‘Huge Mistake’”, Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist (published July 29, 2026).