"Tony" is not just the story of Anthony Bourdain Matt Johnson uses the culinary icon to explore what it means to chase a dream

When Matt Johnson heard Dominic Sessa's story, he knew he was ready to play chef Anthony Bourdain in the film about the period when he was just a young man with a dream of becoming a writer. The actor, whom we first met in 2023 with his film debut The Holdovers, and who won a Critics' Choice Award for Best Young Performer in 2024, had once dreamed of becoming a hockey player. Then an accident cut his career short: Sessa broke his femur, leaving him sidelined and unable to return to the sport he had worked so hard at. The hours once spent on hockey were filled instead by an acting class, and the rest is history.

At the start of Tony - Diario di un giovane cuoco, a film that Johnson directed and co-wrote with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe, Bourdain has no intention whatsoever of working in a kitchen. It is a distant world, an abstract concept — and one that is somewhat reimagined from the book that inspired the film, the bestseller Kitchen Confidential, published in 2000, which serves as the gateway to telling the story of the chef's beginnings, from which all of his subsequent culinary and entertainment successes — his own and others' — followed in turn.

Providence, where it all begins

Bourdain is, in fact, the figure without whom The Bear would probably not exist, and who revolutionized cooking shows as we know them, chronicling the universe of flavors, aromas, and tastes both in front of and behind the camera, making them all the more appetizing for audiences at home.

While in the book Bourdain speaks of his culinary revelation after eating his first oyster as a young boy during a family trip to France, Tony - Diario di un giovane cuoco places all the discoveries that will upend the protagonist's life in the tranquil seaside town of Providence. It is partly by choice and partly by chance that the young man ends up in this coastal town, ready to fill up with visitors come summer — drawn there by the very name of the place as though it were a sign from fate (providence), and ultimately finding his own path.

Tony before becoming Anthony

It is a disappointment that has sent Tony running, driving him to take refuge and reinvent himself — or rather, to lie about who he is — in Providence. The writing program that was supposed to launch him into the world of publishing rejected him, and it is a failure that is somewhat reminiscent of Bourdain's first two books, which flopped before Kitchen Confidential came along. In the film, it is the spark that puts the protagonist in front of a stove — along with the inevitable infatuation with a girl.

Washing dishes is the first step for anyone who sets foot in a kitchen, and in Tony it is the station where the young man will spend most of his time. It is, in effect, a long apprenticeship that Matt Johnson has constructed for his Anthony Bourdain. In doing so, however, the character loses some of his singularity, and the film ends up telling not just the story of one specific talent who found his place in the world, culinary or otherwise. It aims instead to universalize that story, so that Tony's youth and restlessness become the youth and restlessness of everyone.

A state of mind, not a biography

Admittedly, this loss of specificity makes the portrait of Bourdain less precise — and it is in particular the omission of any reference to drug use that gives one pause. In return, the film gains in warmth, because one senses that Johnson's intention is not to make a biography, but rather to capture a state of mind. A drive, an unstoppable way of being that Anthony Bourdain expressed throughout his life and career — one that is characteristic of those who have goals they want to reach, dreams they want to make real, and days they want to fill with meaning.

The film portrays an age when one is still unformed, not yet fully defined, and therefore wonderful — because one can still be anything, whatever one desires, even something one never would have imagined. Tony - Diario di un giovane cuoco is therefore not simply a film about the chef we came to know, but about how we grow up. About how Tony eventually becomes Anthony.