‘Tony’ Is 2026’s Best Limited Opening: Why A24’s Anthony Bourdain Biopic Is a Must-See

There is a scene in the new Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony where a young man, broke and drifting, walks into a Provincetown seafood restaurant and gets handed a knife, a station, and a reason to exist. It sounds small. It is anything but. Tony, the A24 film directed by Matt Johnson and starring Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Bourdain, just delivered one of the best limited openings of 2026 — and it did it on the back of a story that never leaves a single summer.

The Summer That Made Tony

Bourdain fans know the outline: before Kitchen Confidential, before CNN and the world’s most famous food show, there was a messy kid from New Jersey who washed up in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1975 and stumbled into a restaurant kitchen. That’s the entire canvas of Tony. The film is based on Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and the Bourdain estate was unusually involved — it chose to support the project specifically because it “is not a standard biopic and doesn’t attempt to summarize a life.” Instead, per the estate, the film depicts “one transformative summer” in a place that would shape everything that came after.

The casting of Sessa was the first sign this wasn’t going to be a museum piece. Sessa broke out opposite Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers, and as Tony he trades that film’s prep-school polish for a feral, hungry energy. The supporting cast is stacked: Antonio Banderas plays Ciro, the restaurant owner who pushes the kid toward something better; Emilia Jones is Nancy, the high school crush; Leo Woodall and Stavros Halkias round out the kitchen crew. Even the marketing leans into the character’s flaws — the poster quotes Bourdain’s own self-assessment: “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”

Johnson is an inspired choice behind the camera. The Canadian filmmaker built his reputation on Nirvanna the Band the Show and its feature-length follow-up, projects that live on chaotic improvisation and a love for messy, real-feeling moments — exactly the register a Bourdain origin story needs. He clearly didn’t want a hagiography. Every early cut and trailer leans into the grime: the cramped kitchen, the cigarette smoke, the kid who’s clearly a problem for everyone around him. It’s a biopic with its sleeves rolled up.

A Box Office Story Worth Talking About

Here’s where it gets interesting. Tony opened August 7 in just six theaters in New York and Los Angeles, and pulled in roughly $349,000 — a per-screen average of $58,159, the highest of the weekend and one of the best limited openings of the year. Shows sold out in both markets all weekend. The run was so strong it pushed New York’s Angelika Theatre to its best weekend of business since Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme in May 2025. A24 will expand the film to top cities this weekend before going nationwide on August 21.

That trajectory — tiny platform release, monster per-screen numbers, slow rollout — is the classic A24 playbook, and it’s working. For a movie about a guy who spent his career celebrating small, unpretentious places, the rollout feels weirdly on-brand.

What the Critics Are Saying

The film has been sitting at a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes since its first reviews, and the notices have been genuinely enthusiastic rather than respectful-and-bored. Variety’s review leans on the ultimate test: “if an Anthony Bourdain biopic can’t clear the bar called ‘Bourdain would have liked it,’ it’s probably not a good movie. Tony clears that bar.” The same review calls Sessa’s performance the moment “you see an actor become a movie star.” The Hollywood Reporter is a touch more measured — “a slender slice of a famous life” — but Deadline’s Pete Hammond found himself “rooting for this kid like he was Rocky,” and The Wrap compared the film’s ability to make us care about an unlikable protagonist to The Social Network.

The throughline in almost every review is that Tony refuses to sanctify Bourdain. He’s difficult, self-destructive, and arrogant, and the movie doesn’t scrub that off. It just makes you understand where it came from — and why a kitchen full of line cooks became the first place he ever fit in.

Why It Matters Beyond the Movie

Bourdain’s cultural footprint has only grown since his death in 2018. His shows — Travel Channel’s No Reservations and CNN’s Parts Unknown — remain the gold standard for food-and-travel television, and Morgan Neville’s 2021 documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain proved audiences still want to grapple with his legacy. What Tony adds is the origin story: how a directionless kid found the one world that would actually hold him.

It also lands at a moment when food television and food-adjacent storytelling have never been more popular. The restaurant-kitchen drama is a proven crowd-pleaser — just look at the run The Bear has had, turning the chaos of a professional kitchen into some of the most celebrated TV of the decade. Tony is the film version of that same fascination: the kitchen as crucible, the place where people who don’t fit anywhere else learn what they’re made of.

There’s also a quieter reason this movie matters right now. Bourdain’s story has been picked over relentlessly in the eight years since he died — think pieces, retrospectives, a documentary, endless social media tributes. But most of that coverage started at fame, at the TV shows, at the celebrity. Tony does the opposite: it starts before any of that, at the exact moment a kid with no direction walks into a kitchen and discovers the work that will define him. For anyone who has ever felt lost and then found a purpose in a room full of strangers doing honest labor, that’s not a celebrity story. That’s a universal one, and it’s why the movie is connecting with audiences who barely know who Bourdain was.

The Takeaway

Tony is a small movie doing very big business, and it deserves the attention. It’s a biopic that doesn’t summarize a life, a food movie that barely shows you plating, and a star vehicle that treats its star like a live wire instead of a saint. Whether you’re a Bourdain superfan, a Kitchen Confidential reader, or just someone who likes watching a great actor click into gear, this one is worth catching in a theater while it’s still in limited release.

If you’ve seen it already, tell us: does young Tony feel like the Bourdain you know from the screen, or does the film’s version surprise you?