By Charles Hubbard, Film & TV Deputy Editor
Who could have predicted, even five or six years ago, that Matt Johnson would become one of the most talked about directors of 2026? And yet, after years of struggling in obscurity with tiny, esoteric experiments like The Dirties (2013) and Operation Avalanche (2016), the Canadian actor-filmmaker has experienced two wide releases in the same year.
First, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026) - the big-screen adaptation of his short-lived 2017 TV series of (almost) the same name - received widespread critical acclaim after the raves it prompted at South by Southwest in March 2025, becoming Johnson’s first legitimate hit. And now Tony (2026). His most commercial work yet, the film embodies a potential jump to the mainstream for Johnson and a declaration that he can make art that can appeal to wider audiences as well. And not just ones with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Johnson’s beloved Toronto.
As such, the resulting film feels somewhat stripped of a lot of Johnson’s various idiosyncrasies as a filmmaker and seems as though it could have come from any middlebrow filmmaker. That said, it is still a much stronger biopic in terms of structure, performance and focus than most of the filmed Wikipedia articles Hollywood continually farts out when awards season rolls around.
19-year-old Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa cementing his status as a major rising star) - although he prefers to be called Tony by everyone but his mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) - is, by his very own admission, a 'spoiled, miserable and narcissistic young lout'. A compulsive liar with anger issues and zero emotional intelligence, his single-minded pursuit of both a career as a writer and his high school crush Nancy (Emilia Jones stuffed into an outdated archetype) makes him apathetic to everything else.
This continues even when frosty and inscrutable chef Jose Vatel (Antonio Banderas, whose inhuman inability to age is explicitly referenced in the script) offers the broke wannabe-writer a place to sleep in return for washing dishes at the Flagship - his fast-food-but-seafood restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. What follows is less a rise to fame in the ilk of most Hollywood biopics and more a meandering, sleep-deprived crawl towards Tony finally realising that he might have a bit of a future in the culinary world.
The film’s lack of interest in Bourdain’s actual persona and career is both the film’s strongest feature and its ultimate Achilles heel. First, Sessa seems to be doing less of an impression of Bourdain himself and rather one of his director, often adopting Johnson’s Canadian twang even when his character was born and raised in New York. Inexplicable (and perhaps unintentional) as this may be, I’ll take it any day over similar performances given by Rami Malek and Austin Butler, who feel so desperate to replicate the voice and mannerisms of the iconic figure they’re playing, they end up squashing all humanity and spontaneity out of the performance.
And Sessa has humanity and spontaneity in spades - you’ll be grateful the budget wasn’t big enough for them to afford Timothée Chalamet. Notably missing are Bourdain’s notorious and extremely well-documented rage issues (aside from one obligatory wall-punching scene), meaning that, compared to the various violent, coke-snorting chefs at the Flagship, he often seems like the coolest head in the room.
However, Johnson’s apparent lack of interest in his subject also means that he’s in no hurry to get to any of Bourdain's more iconic moments in the spotlight. He instead contently wallows in the consequences of Tony’s actions, especially how much they alienate those around him - think of it as a much chiller, slightly more optimistic version of Marty Supreme (2025). Or an adaptation of exclusively the second and third chapters of a celebrity biography where they haven’t quite figured out their 'thing' yet.
Unfortunately, it only disregards adherence to the tired biopic formula in favour of the equally rote coming-of-age dramedy playbook where the protagonist is inevitably brought to his lowest point 30 minutes before the end - a narrative doldrum that always rings as entirely false as you know they’ll be back on top by the time the credits roll. Unfortunately, unlike its namesake, Tony never recovers from its late-stage turn into cloying sentimentality, leading to a particularly cringe-inducing final line that produced the same response in me as Alden Ehrenreich’s line about JFK did in Oppenheimer (2023).
The true bright spots here are the supporting performances of Banderas and Leo Woodall, who plays Sal, the womanising, drug-addicted sous chef who takes Tony under his wing the moment he first burns his hand on a scalding pot. It’s obviously a fairly lazy choice to cast Banderas as a mysterious Spanish silver fox (or, in this instance, a black-hair-dyed fox) but this is nevertheless his strongest and most touching performance since his career-best, Oscar-nominated turn in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory (2019).
Woodall is deceptively perfect casting as a Long Island scumbag - he already proved his bona fides at playing perpetually hungover pretty boys in One Day (2024) - but also brings intense and unexpected pathos to the role when his character’s hidden vulnerability is revealed. Jones is sadly unable to make much of an impact in a part that seeks only to ask the question 'What if the obviously fictitious woman played by Rooney Mara in The Social Network (2010) was expanded into the second lead of the movie?'
Megan Mclean
I’m afraid if anyone’s going to hate this film, it’s probably fans of Johnson’s other work. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call this anonymous, it’s certainly difficult to believe that the same man can make something as ambitious, personal and wildly experimental as Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and a sturdy small-scale biopic like this in the same year. That said, it’s impossible not to be at least a little charmed by the film’s earnest, blue-collar charm and Sessa’s wonderfully unaffected performance.
Featured image: IMDb / Tony
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