A24's Tony, a comedy-drama about the summer that shaped Anthony Bourdain, is among this week's notable cinema releases, starring Dominic Sessa as the 19-year-old Bourdain, rejected for a writing fellowship and working in a restaurant kitchen in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The film's cast also includes Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall and Antonio Banderas, according to this week's release guides.
Sessa's casting carries its own echo: he broke out in The Holdovers as a young man stranded over a winter break, and Tony asks him for the summer version, a kitchen job in a resort town that becomes an education. Bourdain's mythology is unusually literary for a chef's, because he wrote it himself, in Kitchen Confidential and after, which makes a coming-of-age film a defensible way in: this is the apprentice before the persona. The release guides place Tony at the head of a quiet week, with a crime thriller and several international titles behind it, which gives a character piece room to find its audience by word of mouth rather than opening-weekend force. Whether it honours or flattens its subject is the argument audiences will have, and Bourdain's readers are not a forgiving constituency.
Entertainment coverage is an industry story wearing a costume. Behind every release date sit rights, restorations, restorations budgets, marketing windows and an audience whose habits keep moving. The desk reports the work itself first, the business second and the speculation, labelled as speculation, last, because readers can tell when a story is a poster with paragraphs attached.
Biopics of cultural figures usually arrive decades late and play safe. Tony is nearer, smaller and more interested in formation than fame, which is both its risk and its likely charm. A24's audience trusts the label for exactly this kind of wager, and Sessa is becoming the actor a generation casts when it needs a young man thinking.
The film's weekend numbers, against modest competition, will indicate whether word of mouth is building. Reviews will settle the larger question every Bourdain project faces, which is whether the film captures the voice or merely the biography. The voice, as his readers will tell the filmmakers, is the whole estate. Reporting note: this story was checked against at least two reputable reports or official records before publication, and it will be updated if the responsible authorities, leagues, companies or researchers publish materially new verified information.
