Tony: A Hero’s Journey Into the Kitchen
4 min read
Tony follows 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain played by Dominic Sessa in A24's 10th biopic. Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash and A24
By Lucas Cuny, Associate Faculty member and Co-Chair of the Film and Journalism Departments at San Bernardino Valley College
As with any hero’s journey — and this one certainly follows that path — Tony, played by Dominic Sessa (in a role that builds on his breakthrough in The Holdovers), is on a mission to secure a fellowship that will let him write a novel. Little does Vassar College, which Tony attends, know that he plans on taking this fellowship, moving to New York to write his novel, and telling the school to pound sand once it’s done.
Tony heads home from college after meeting what becomes the catalyst for the whole film— as it so often is for young men — a girl. He tells her he’s going to get a fellowship, that he’ll be in New York. She tells him to look her up in September.
Back home, Tony is met by an overly excited father and an extremely judgmental mother. It turns out Tony has a knack for not being entirely honest — doing that thing all young men do, telling tall tales to get what they want. His mother seems to be the only one who sees through it. At the family dinner table, he announces to his brother and the rest of the family that he’s landed the fellowship — only to get the call moments later that he didn’t. What’s striking, and works as a lovely piece of foreshadowing, is how much time the film spends on the family at the dinner table and in the kitchen. Anyone who knows Anthony Bourdain’s story knows exactly why that’s going to matter.
Distressed about the fellowship, Tony decides to follow the girl to Provincetown instead of heading to New York to write his novel. Once there, he discovers she already has a boyfriend — sending him into his first spiral, an intoxicated stupor that leads him to his ObiWan: a local chef and restaurant owner played wonderfully by Antonio Banderas.
If you know anything about Bourdain’s real backstory, he often talked about starting in kitchens washing dishes and shucking oysters — and the film shows those humble beginnings vividly. Tony ends up with a running mate in the kitchen: the guy shucking oysters next to him at the sink, played by Leo Woodall (best known from the second season of The White Lotus, where he played Jack — tangled up with Quentin, the “gay uncle” scheming against one of the hotel’s guests, and briefly involved with Portia).
The two go out, party, and have a good time. Tony learns the ropes of the kitchen and gets his first real taste of drugs — and later watches his new friend shoot up heroin. The next day, the friend doesn’t show up for his shift, and it’s Tony’s big break: the chef, played by Antonio Banderas, teaches him how to shuck oysters himself.
Throughout the kitchen and restaurant scenes, the film returns again and again to the same visual language — close-ups of food prep, dishes being washed — and eventually to the “family meal,” the informal dinner nearly every restaurant staff shares after (or, in some cases, before) service. It’s the only point in the film where Tony finds something like a real family.
Banderas truly carries this film. Sessa is good, but I felt he leaned a bit too hard on nuances we’ve already seen from him in The Holdovers — which may well be exactly why he was cast. Still, he does start to show some life as the story develops into one about someone on the verge of becoming something. Tony reckons with his own shortcomings and starts chasing the dream that will eventually make him Anthony Bourdain. He leaves Vassar, and Banderas’s chef writes him a letter of recommendation that gets him into culinary school.
One more note worth mentioning: Rich Sommer, who plays Tony’s father, is also familiar to television audiences as Harry Crane on Mad Men.
Overall verdict: see it in theaters if you can. It’s currently in limited release through A24, and it’s playing at Regal Cinemas here in the Inland Empire — Riverside and San Bernardino.
About the Director
Tony is directed by Matt Johnson, a Canadian filmmaker and actor known for blending real events with a scrappy, docufiction sensibility. His prior work includes:
- The Dirties (2013) — his debut feature, which won Best Feature Narrative at Slamdance
Operation Avalanche (2016) - BlackBerry (2023) — his critical and commercial breakthrough, a biopic tracing the rise and fall of the BlackBerry smartphone, which earned him directing honors at the Canadian Screen Awards and the Vancouver Film Critics Circle
- Nirvanna the Band the Show (TV series, 2017–2018) and its 2025 feature adaptation, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
Johnson has built a career on stories rooted in real people and events, often writing, directing, and acting in his own films — a throughline that carries into Tony.
