The smartest decision Tony makes is refusing to begin with Anthony Bourdain.
There is no famous chef yet. No television host. No leather-jacketed traveler explaining a city through the people who feed it. Matt Johnson's film finds a 19-year-old in 1975 who wants very badly to seem like the kind of person the world will eventually find interesting.
Dominic Sessa plays Tony as intelligent, insecure, obnoxious, funny, and almost entirely unformed. He has literary ambitions, strong opinions, a romantic fixation, and the dangerous confidence of someone who has not yet accumulated enough experience to understand how little he knows.
After failing to secure the summer opportunity he expected, Tony heads to Provincetown, Massachusetts, following Nancy, played by Emilia Jones. He arrives with little money and even less practical ability, then stumbles into work at a seafood restaurant.
The kitchen changes the movie because it changes the scale of Tony's problems.
Outside, he can perform intelligence. Inside, none of that matters if he cannot keep up.
Johnson understands why restaurant kitchens have become such durable cinematic spaces. They operate through hierarchy, repetition, noise, profanity, skill, and the strange intimacy produced when people spend long hours doing difficult work beside one another. Tony initially sees the kitchen as another environment he can talk his way through. It responds by humiliating him.
That is where Sessa becomes more than clever casting.
His physical resemblance to a young Bourdain is useful, but the performance works because he captures the contradiction underneath the image. Tony wants people to believe he is detached while caring desperately about how they see him. He performs cynicism because sincerity would expose how uncertain he feels.
Sessa has a face that remains readable even when the character is trying to hide behind attitude. A joke can collapse into embarrassment before he finishes smiling. Anger often arrives a second after someone has correctly identified his insecurity.
The movie does not ask him to imitate the public Bourdain audiences remember. Instead, Sessa creates a young man from whom that future personality could plausibly emerge.
Antonio Banderas nearly steals the film as the chef who becomes Tony's most important mentor. The character is partly a dramatic construction rather than a literal recreation of one person from Bourdain's life, but Banderas gives him enough specificity that the function never feels mechanical.
He understands that mentorship in a kitchen rarely looks like a speech about following your dreams. It is correction, repetition, standards, irritation, and eventually trust.
The best scenes between the two are quiet. Food is prepared. Bottles are filled. Ingredients are handled correctly because someone has finally learned why correctness matters. Johnson allows labor itself to become the lesson.
That is a welcome alternative to the usual biopic habit of treating every early experience as a neon sign pointing toward future greatness.
Tony certainly contains moments of recognition. Knowing who Bourdain becomes creates an unavoidable charge when he discovers the rhythm of the kitchen or begins to understand what food can mean beyond consumption. But the movie mostly resists winking at the audience.
The future matters less than the fact that, for the first time, Tony finds something that demands more from him than performance.
That focus also allows the movie to function for viewers who have little attachment to Bourdain. At its core, Tony is a coming-of-age story about a young man learning that having an identity is not the same as having earned one.
The Provincetown setting gives the film a loose summer energy. Tony moves between kitchen work, drinking, sex, friendship, romantic frustration, and the feeling that everyone around him has already begun living more honestly than he has. The period detail is warm without becoming fetishistic, and Johnson avoids turning 1975 into a museum of recognizable objects.
Emilia Jones has the least forgiving role. Nancy is partly the reason Tony comes to Provincetown and partly the person most capable of seeing through the version of himself he presents. Jones gives her patience and intelligence, but the screenplay too often uses the relationship to measure Tony's growth rather than allowing Nancy an equally complete trajectory.
That is the film's most conventional element. For a movie admirably uninterested in the standard cradle-to-grave biopic, its romantic material can fall into familiar coming-of-age patterns: the arrogant young man disappoints the woman who understands him, receives a painful lesson, and begins becoming worthy of the life ahead.
Leo Woodall provides a more dangerous alternative as Sal, representing the seductive side of kitchen culture: skill, charisma, recklessness, substances, and the mythology of men who treat self-destruction as evidence that they are living more fully than everyone else.
The film is careful not to turn those qualities into a simple warning from the future. Bourdain's later struggles are impossible to remove from the audience's knowledge, but Johnson largely refuses to build the movie around tragedy that Tony himself cannot yet see.
That restraint is important. A lesser version would frame every drink, drug, or dark moment as prophecy. Tony instead allows the young man to remain young.
The approach occasionally makes the film feel softer than its subject. Its affection for Bourdain is obvious, and there are moments when the coming-of-age structure organizes his rougher qualities into a cleaner journey than real life likely offered. The kitchen can become romanticized precisely because the movie understands how intoxicating its culture was to him.
But affection is not the same as worship. Tony is selfish. He lies. He treats other people as supporting characters in the version of himself he is trying to write. Sessa never asks us to excuse that behavior simply because we know the person will eventually become beloved.
That honesty gives the film its warmth.
Tony is not really about discovering food. It is about discovering work: the humiliating, repetitive process of becoming good at something after spending years assuming that being interesting would be enough.
For a film about a person who later became famous for his voice, some of its best scenes are built around watching him shut up and learn.
