Anthony Bourdain was a somewhat Marmite figure, in that for some people, he means very little and exists in the role of being crude and crass. In that same breath, Bourdain’s counterculture existence is a poster boy for men who drink from the well of being pretentious and problematic. However, as with Marmite, some people disagree. Rather than a bad taste, they find their neurones firing off at the thought of a man who seasoned his gonzo journalistic ways with a touch of care, sincerity, and respect for others. He began his life wanting to be a writer, then found himself in the kitchens of Cape Cod and New York, only to find fame as a writer and television personality in the twilight years of his life. To some, he warrants attention because his career and life haven’t been easy. He was the patron saint of career changes and submitting to the flow of the current. That is inspiring, and in the candour, sound, and thunder of his prose, some found shelter in knowing that he saw the world in the same way. Whether you like him or not, Bourdain was a brash, umami-like individual who inspired either indifference or deification.
Perhaps this is why director Matt Johnson felt that the script for the 2026 biopic on Bourdain was the right story to tell. Tony arrives at Bourdain not as the completed cultural figure of television fame, but as a man still in the process of becoming himself. Before the travel shows, before the late-night conversations, before the carefully cultivated image of the worldly, melancholic raconteur, there was the kitchen. More specifically, there was the man who emerged from it.
In doing so, the film condenses the opening movement of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s 2000 memoir that transformed his culinary autobiography into something approaching countercultural scripture. The book’s opening chapters possess the messy, intoxicating quality of a confession. It is a young man discovering drugs, sex, kitchens, and the strange fraternity of restaurant work, simultaneously disgusted and seduced by the world around him. Tony necessarily reduces this sprawling mythology into something more manageable, and the result is a curious kind of biopic. It is less an excavation of Bourdain than a recreation of the Bourdain we already know.
There is something almost plasticine about Johnson’s construction of him. The film moulds the anecdotes, personalities and environments of Kitchen Confidential into recognisable cinematic shapes, pressing the rough edges of Bourdain’s life into a coherent narrative that can be consumed in two hours. This is both the film’s appeal and its fundamental tension. Bourdain’s story is inherently resistant to neatness. His contradictions were not incidental to his identity, but constitutive of it. Yet Tony must, by necessity, give those contradictions a beginning, middle and end.
What emerges is therefore less a definitive portrait than a kind of cinematic Bourdain simulacrum, a tactile and recognisable version of the man assembled from the cultural debris he left behind. The irony is that Bourdain made his name by resisting precisely this sort of sanitisation. His great talent was taking the ugly, the excessive and the embarrassing and finding within them something human. Tony consequently becomes most interesting when it acknowledges the artificiality of its own construction. This is not simply Bourdain’s life, but Bourdain’s life remembered, mythologised and reshaped into the language of the biopic.
The question, then, is whether Johnson can make this plasticine figure breathe. Beneath the drugs, the profanity, the kitchen bravado and the familiar mythology, is there still the vulnerability and sincerity that made Bourdain more than merely another loud man shouting from the margins?
Like Bourdain’s, my criticisms come with some love and fondness. Out of the dissatisfaction that arrives with the polished version of Bourdain’s beginnings as a chef, the blitzkrieg-like, bratty performance of Dominic Sessa as the titular chef is enough to turbocharge the film to the finish line. Sessa understands that this younger Bourdain is not yet the wry philosopher of Parts Unknown, but a person who has not quite worked out what to do with all the noise inside his own head. There is an almost combustible quality to his performance. He is restless, defensive, funny, cruel, vulnerable and desperate to prove that he belongs somewhere. His prickliness feels less like an innate character flaw than a form of armour, a way of making himself difficult to hurt before anyone else gets the opportunity.
This is where the tenderness of Antonio Banderas’ character becomes so important. Against Sessa’s volatility, Banderas provides a gentler register, offering a version of masculinity that does not demand hardness as a prerequisite for survival. Their relationship allows Tony to consider change not as some grand moment of personal reinvention, but as something that happens incrementally through proximity to other people. Bourdain does not suddenly become a better man because the plot requires it. Rather, his ethics are slowly cultivated through experience. The world chips away at him. People soften him. Failure embarrasses him. Love gives him something to lose. Cooking gives him somewhere to put all of his vigour.
There is consequently something rather moving in the way Tony presents cooking as Bourdain’s first creative language. Before he could write about himself, he could cook. Before he could articulate his anxieties about belonging, failure, masculinity or addiction, he could put his hands to work. The kitchen provides a vocabulary for feelings that he is otherwise incapable of expressing. Its violence, speed and absurdity suit the young Bourdain because they permit him to be loud, difficult and obsessive, but they also impose discipline upon him. Cooking requires attention. It requires repetition. It requires other people. Most importantly, it requires him to transform something raw into something else. In that sense, the kitchen becomes an externalisation of Bourdain’s own development. He enters it as something unruly and unfinished, and through the creative process of cooking begins to understand that transformation is possible.
The film is at its most effective when it recognises that this transformation is not simply culinary. Bourdain’s evolution from chef to writer is presented as a change in the method through which he understands and communicates the world. Cooking initially allows him to express what he cannot say, while writing eventually gives him the means to explain what cooking taught him. The furious energy of the kitchen becomes the furious energy of the page. The chef who once communicated through a plate, a service or an act of physical labour eventually communicates through sentences. Kitchen Confidential can therefore be understood not as the beginning of Bourdain’s voice, but as the point at which a voice that had been developing through food finally discovers its written form.
This makes Sessa’s performance particularly valuable because he does not play Bourdain as a finished product. His Bourdain is someone in the painful process of acquiring a moral vocabulary. The bravado is there, but so is the possibility that it might eventually become something more generous. The film understands that becoming kinder does not necessarily mean becoming less complicated. Bourdain does not have his rough edges polished away so much as learn how to use them differently. Still the infantile, early adolescence simmers and fizzes, but it becomes purposeful. The anger becomes curiosity. The arrogance becomes confidence. The contrarianism becomes independence. Even the appetite for excess eventually finds a more constructive outlet. What begins as a young man trying to escape himself becomes a man learning that he might instead have to understand himself.
Perhaps this is the quiet thesis beneath the film’s more familiar biopic machinery. People are not fixed. Principles can evolve, ethics can be learned, and the person who seems determined to remain permanently prickly can still be softened by the world around them. Tony is therefore less compelling as a history lesson about Anthony Bourdain than as a story about the strange, painful, and often creative process of becoming a person. Cooking is his first attempt at that process. Writing is what eventually allows him to tell us what he discovered there.
Perhaps the film’s most interesting meditation comes through its repeated consideration of the word ‘Providence’ itself. Providence is, of course, a place, but the word carries another meaning: the idea of a guiding force, of events being shaped by something beyond our immediate understanding. For a young Bourdain, who spends so much of the film attempting to force his own destiny into existence, this becomes an unexpectedly appropriate idea. He wants to believe that his life is something he can construct through appetite, rebellion and sheer force of personality, yet the film increasingly suggests that becoming Bourdain is less about controlling where the current takes him and more about learning to recognise what the current has placed in front of him. Providence consequently becomes both destination and philosophy. It is the possibility that meaning can be found in the things we do not initially understand, in the people we encounter and in the circumstances that gradually alter our sense of who we are. This is particularly significant because Bourdain’s greatest transformation is not really about becoming somebody important. It is about becoming somebody capable of noticing the importance of other people. The young man who begins the film is almost painfully preoccupied with himself, with his ambitions, his failures, his appetites and his desire to prove that he matters. By its conclusion, that self-obsession has begun to give way to something more generous. What begins as a con to steal donations for the repairs of his mentor’s restaurant soon changes into a moment of metamorphosis. Rather than steal the money for his own pursuits, the boon of offering up his services for the good of others dawns upon him. He realises that his value isn’t defined by how he views himself, or even how others might view him. Instead, in being selfless and without ego, value is what you give. Providence, in this sense, becomes a lesson in looking outward.
Perhaps life does not require us to know exactly where we are going, only that we remain attentive to what appears along the way. This makes the ending feel less like the completion of a conventional rise to greatness and more like the beginning of Bourdain’s real education. Cooking has taught him how to create; writing will eventually teach him how to articulate, but Providence teaches him how to observe. It is a fitting final idea for a film about a man who would later travel the world because, ultimately, Bourdain’s greatest gift was not that he made himself interesting. It was that he learned how to find interest in everybody else.