Name: Tony
Director: Matt Johnson
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Released: 2026-08-07T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 106 min
Cast: Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Stavros Halkias

The light in a resort town at the tail of summer is a specific thing: long, salt-scrubbed, gold sliding to grey over the water. A24‘s new film drops a teenager into exactly that light and lets it carry half the story. The palette is all faded denim and sun-bleached awning, the colour of a photograph left too long in a glovebox. A restless nineteen-year-old steps off the road into Provincetown, the sandbar town at the far curl of Cape Cod, and talks his way into the steam and clatter of a seasonal restaurant kitchen. The kid is Anthony Bourdain, long before anyone had reason to know the name.

The film is called Tony, which is what Bourdain answered to before he became the lean, self-lacerating chronicler of kitchens and far countries. It catches him at the hinge, the season a directionless teenager learns that the violent, intimate choreography of a working kitchen is the first thing that has ever felt like a place to belong. Director Matt Johnson builds the picture around that recognition, and around a face. Dominic Sessa, the breakout presence of The Holdovers, plays Tony with a watchful stillness that becomes the movie’s tuning fork.

Casting is the film’s first argument. Sessa plays Bourdain not as a legend in embryo but as a watcher, a tall, hungry kid reading a room before he knows what to do with it, which is precisely the sensibility that would later make Bourdain such a camera-ready traveller. Opposite him, Antonio Banderas is the Chef who runs the kitchen, a figure of heat, authority and seduction, the gravitational body a young cook orbits. Emilia Jones plays Nancy, the summer’s romantic centre, while Leo Woodall and Stavros Halkias fill the line as the men who teach Tony the trade the hard way.

Johnson arrives at this from an unusual direction. His earlier work, scrappy and funny and half-documentary in texture, built on real institutions and real obsessives, has always been fascinated by how people perform competence inside closed worlds. A kitchen is that world distilled: a hierarchy, a private language, a set of rituals invisible to the customers eating twenty feet away. The subject suits him. There is a risk that a director known for meta mischief over-styles a coming-of-age story, but the trailer’s textures, the wet sand, the fluorescent prep line, the bodies packed into a hot service, suggest he has committed to the physical world rather than winking at it.

Place does the heavy lifting. Provincetown is not a backdrop here but a character: the harbour light, the dune shacks and drag bars, the particular bohemian permission of a queer summer town at the edge of the continent. The kitchen scenes read close and hot, all copper and grease-shine and knife-glint, while the exteriors open onto that enormous Cape sky. The contrast is the film’s visual thesis, the cramped, ecstatic interior of the line against the wide, indifferent light outside, and a young man assembling a self in the gap between them.

Food itself becomes texture rather than spectacle. The camera lingers on the unglamorous choreography of prep: the scrape of a dull blade being steeled sharp, ice going to water on a tray of grey fish, the orange flare of a flat-top at the peak of a rush. There is no gauzy nostalgia in the way it is shot. The kitchen looks like labour, hot and repetitive and occasionally beautiful, and the film trusts that the beauty of competence under pressure can hold a scene without a speech to explain it. That trust is the surest sign of what kind of movie this wants to be.

What Tony cannot do is escape what the audience already knows. Every frame carries hindsight: the fame, the books, the television years, the death that turned Bourdain into a secular patron saint of appetite and honesty. An origin story about a beloved dead man is always tempted to draw a straight line from one summer to the myth, to make an ordinary teenage drift look like destiny. The trailer flirts with that tidiness. Whether the finished film lets young Tony be genuinely lost rather than merely pre-famous is the question a two-minute cut cannot answer. A magnetic lead and a heavyweight like Banderas raise the stakes; they do not settle them.

Dominic Sessa plays a young Anthony Bourdain in the A24 film Tony (2026). — Dominic Sessa in *Tony* (2026)

The ensemble runs deep. Alongside Sessa, Banderas, Jones and Woodall, the cast includes Stavros Halkias, Dagmara Dominczyk, Rich Sommer as Bourdain’s father Pierre, Michael Jibrin and Monica Raymund. Johnson directs from a screenplay he wrote with Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, drawing on the Provincetown chapter of Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential. Star Thrower Entertainment and Zapruder Films produced, with A24 handling distribution.

Tony runs 106 minutes. A24 opens it in New York and Los Angeles on August 7, 2026, before a nationwide expansion on August 21. It lands as the rare biographical film that already knows its subject’s ending and chooses, instead, to sit with a beginning: a hot kitchen, a cold ocean, and a nineteen-year-old finding out what he is for.