Nobody has actually reviewed Tony yet. Rotten Tomatoes has a page and no score. There’s no wide critical consensus, no embargo lift, nothing but a trailer, a featurette, and one room full of chefs who got to see it early. So take this for what it is: a bet, not a verdict. But it’s an informed bet, and after two decades writing about the people this movie is trying to honor, I’ve got opinions.
Here’s the pitch. A24 and director Matt Johnson, the guy behind BlackBerry, aren’t touching the Bourdain most people know. No CNN passport stamps, no Emmy shelf, no Les Halles kitchen with his name on the door. Tony opens on a broke, directionless kid who just got rejected from a writing fellowship and ends up washing dishes in Provincetown in the summer of 1975, years before Kitchen Confidential made him famous for admitting things chefs weren’t supposed to admit. Dominic Sessa, fresh off The Holdovers, plays him. Antonio Banderas plays Ciro, the mentor who puts a knife in his hand and a reason to get up in the morning in front of him for the first time.
That character is drawn from a real person, and the real story is better than most biopics bother to dig for. Ciriaco “Ciro” Cozzi came to Provincetown in 1947 to study painting, not cook, and opened Ciro & Sal’s out of his own basement in 1954 with his friend Sal Del Deo, an artist who’d originally wanted to be an opera singer. Neither man had cooked professionally a day in his life. Cozzi later opened the Flagship Restaurant, which is where Bourdain actually worked, and which closed years ago. Every Provincetown regular who’s eaten under those low ceilings on Kiley Court knows this story already. Whether the movie earns the right to borrow it is the real question.
Tony doesn’t try to summarize a legend. It tries to catch one before he knew he was becoming anything at all.
Sessa has said, smartly, that he refused to do an impression. There’s almost nothing to impersonate anyway. A handful of old photographs, no video from that era, just Bourdain’s own writing and whatever tone you can pull from Parts Unknown two decades later. Johnson has described the film as Bourdain looking back at himself and deciding what to keep and what to cut, which is exactly the trick Bourdain pulled on every page of Kitchen Confidential. If the movie actually pulls that off instead of just gesturing at it, that’s the difference between a good film and a forgettable one.
The best evidence so far isn’t from critics. It’s from Food & Wine’s industry screening, where the room was packed with working chefs instead of press. An early scene shows Bourdain nearly hurting himself from bad knife work, and by every account the theater went dead silent, then broke into laughter that only makes sense if you’ve actually bled on a cutting board. That’s not a reaction you can fake or market your way into. People who’ve worked a line recognized something.
The Bourdain estate has publicly backed the film too, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Biopic families usually keep their distance or fight in public. This one didn’t.
None of that guarantees the movie works. Biopics this narrow either feel like a real summer or feel like an acting exercise, and there’s no way to know which until the lights go down. But the choice to stay inside one summer instead of chasing the whole life is the right instinct, and it’s the instinct Bourdain himself would have argued for. He spent his whole career refusing the tidy version of anything, including himself.
Tony opens in New York and Los Angeles on August 7 and expands nationwide on August 21, from A24.
