I’m always a little apprehensive going into a biographical film; the more famous the subject, the greater my skepticism. A real life, especially one remarkable enough to be immortalized on screen, should be rich material for a movie, and has proven so on many occasions. But the pull to lazily throw together a cradle-to-grave greatest hits collection is strong. Too often, Hollywood’s obsession with IP produces biopics that simply serve the subject. It’s hard to make a good film when your primary goal is brand management. So, fair or not, these movies have to work a little harder to win me over.

It took Tony just a few minutes. This film dramatizes the sections of Anthony Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential that describe his youth working in a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, condensing about a decade into a single summer. Bourdain is a figure who means a lot to a great deal of people, and it could be that Tony is loaded with recognizable references to his life. However, speaking as someone with only peripheral knowledge of him and his work, those details would merely be additive.

Co-writer and director Matt Johnson, whose Blackberry flew impressively close to the Social Network sun in 2023, has once again taken true-story source material and made a real movie. It works on its own terms, with or without the halo of its subject’s career. It’s actually about something. And it’s a delight to watch.

In Tony, Young Anthony Bourdain Is Both Unlikable & Lovable

Tony opens with a quote from Bourdain describing his young self as “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout… badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” Aside from being a hell of a way to introduce your protagonist, this is also Johnson tipping his hand: The coming-of-age film that follows is both a meditation on each one of those adjectives and an ass-kicking stretched out to feature length. It’s sincerely interested in who this lost 19-year-old thinks he is, who he actually is, and who he’s going to choose to become.

At the start of the summer of 1975, he believes he’s a writer. Tony (Dominic Sessa) is a student at Vassar whose plan for the summer is to win the school’s undergraduate writing grant and use the money to fund a few months in New York. The actual writing part? Child’s play – just like convincing the faculty he knows what he’s doing. He brags to Nancy (Emilia Jones), a girl he’s liked since high school, that he’s practically already gotten it. When he says as much to his mother (Dagmara Domińczyk), who has a habit of making him feel intellectually inferior, it sounds more desperate than cocky.

When he doesn’t get it, he can’t bring himself to tell his family. Or anyone, really. He just heads to Cape Cod, where he knows Nancy will be spending the summer, with no other plan than just to be with her. And when the first thing he learns upon arriving is that she has a boyfriend, he really has no plan. So, he goes to a local dive, gets too drunk, and embarrasses himself.

In one moment, as if simultaneously finding the angel and the devil that will sit on his shoulders for the rest of the film, he’s robbed of all his money and gifted a place to sleep. As suddenly as he arrived, he finds himself working at that dive in the kitchen as the dishwasher – while lying to Nancy about being there for the writing grant he of course won.

What’s wonderful about Sessa’s performance is that Tony obviously isn’t the hotshot he pretends to be, but he’s also not all that good at pretending. It’s not so much that he thinks he’s great but that for whatever reason he needs to believe that he is. That one distinction is how Sessa can embody all the epigraph’s unlikable traits and remain remarkably easy to root for. It’s delicate involving work.

Tony’s Kitchen Ensemble Is The Movie’s Greatest Strength

He’s far from the only Tony cast member delivering at that level. In the film, which is structured in binaries down to the repeated use of over-the-shoulder shots, Sessa’s hero is shown two paths represented by two different role models. Sal (Leo Woodall), a fellow member of the kitchen staff, is all-consuming charisma. He’s coarse and crude and violent but also funny and charming gliding through life like a chaotic trickster god. Woodall is absolutely irresistible in this role, and the movie doesn’t work without him. Johnson doses him out in just the right amounts allowing him to steal scenes without risk of running away with the whole movie.

Chef (Antonio Banderas), meanwhile, is practically the opposite of how Bourdain described his young self. He is certainly discipline – he takes his cooking seriously draws amusing lines around tardiness and blasphemy and wakes an oversleeping Tony with a bucket of water each morning. But he is also kindness or rather care. He is the one encouraging his young employee to consider building a life as well as the habits required to sustain it. Banderas’ tenderness here recalls his career-best work in Pain and Glory. Come fall if he becomes a key player in the Best Supporting Actor conversation don’t be surprised.

Ultimately though what’s most memorable is what the actors create together. Tony is frequently laugh-out-loud funny and much of that is centered around the kitchen environment which in the film feels truly alive. The mix of energies that Sessa Woodall and Banderas bring along with the welcome comedic timing of Stavros Halkias and all-business sternness of Michael Jibrin as two more cooks create an atmosphere that crackles with dramatic potential. Pair that with grimy lived-in production design and you have an environment that captures everything about it Tony would experience as life-changing.

There is more I could say – Tony has blossomed for me in retrospect far more than I expected in the moment. But as a final note it’s worth saying that this movie is thoroughly enjoyable to sit through. It’s some of the best time I’ve spent in a theater this year.

Tony releases in select theaters on August 7 before expanding nationwide on August 24.