Dominic Sessa gives his first movie-star performance in the Tony movie, playing the young Anthony Bourdain in Matt Johnson’s film. Variety says the role turns a kitchen-set origin story into the kind of early-career showcase that can change how an actor is cast next.
Tracing the summer the 19-year-old Bourdain spent working in a kitchen in Provincetown, the movie has an enchanted spirit of discovery that recalls Adventureland and the films of Richard Linklater. The review also places it in the same biopic lane as Get On Up and Rocketman, but this one comes with a sharper sales pitch: an actor stepping into a life before the fame arrives.
Vassar College and 1975
The film opens with Bourdain trying to impress a panel of English professors at Vassar College, pitching the novel he wants to write so he can win a summer writing fellowship. That setup gives the movie a clear before-and-after structure: the restless college student on one side, the restaurant kitchen on the other, with Provincetown as the hinge between them.
The story is set in 1975, and the review says the movie stays true to what happened in that summer even as some of it is fictionalized. That split matters because the film is built as a romance, so the emotional line is shaped as much by structure as by record.
Kitchen Confidential in 2000
The film draws from several early chapters of Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, the 2000 book that made Bourdain an overnight celebrity. That source gives Tony its cleanest industry hook: it is not just a biopic about a famous writer, but an origin story about the moment before the voice became the brand.
The review also says Bourdain became a functional heroin addict, a reminder that the memoir’s hard-edged authority came from lived damage as much as wit. Johnson, who also directed Blackberry and Nirvana The Band the Show the Movie, is working in a mode that favors acceleration, and Tony appears to use that tempo to turn a summer job into a career blueprint.
Anthony Bourdain and the voice
Anthony Bourdain is the name he called himself then, and the film keeps circling the gap between that younger self and the writer he became. The review’s comparison to Howard Stern is less about imitation than texture: the voice, the posture, the refusal to sound polished.
For Sessa, that makes Tony a useful proving ground. The role asks him to carry a film before the persona hardens, and Variety’s verdict gives him exactly that kind of boost: not just another credit, but a performance that reads like a first step into leading-man territory.
