A24’s coming-of-age portrait skips the celebrity-chef mythology and rewinds to a teenager washing dishes on Cape Cod. Fans are wary; the estate is on board.

Anthony Bourdain spent much of his life resisting the idea that anyone should be turned into a legend, least of all him. So there is a built-in tension in ‘Tony,’ the A24 film that arrives in U.S. theaters on August 7, 2026 — a movie about a man who would likely have been suspicious of a movie about him. The filmmakers seem to know it, and their answer is to make something that is deliberately not a monument.

Not a greatest-hits biopic

‘Tony’ is directed by Matt Johnson, the inventive Canadian filmmaker behind ‘BlackBerry,’ from a screenplay by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe. Rather than march through the familiar chapters of Bourdain’s fame — the bestselling books, the globe-trotting television, the transformation into a cultural conscience — the film rewinds to his formative youth in the mid-1970s, when a teenage Bourdain took a summer restaurant job on Cape Cod. That setting is drawn directly from ‘Kitchen Confidential,’ Bourdain’s era-defining 2000 memoir, whose early pages describe the seaside kitchen where he first fell for the adrenaline, camaraderie and controlled chaos of professional cooking. (Sources differ slightly on the exact year and town — accounts place it around 1975 or 1976, in Provincetown or the broader Cape — so the specifics are best treated as approximate.)

A rising cast

Dominic Sessa, who broke out as the prickly, wounded teenager in ‘The Holdovers,’ plays the young Bourdain — a piece of casting that leans on Sessa’s gift for combining swagger and vulnerability. Antonio Banderas co-stars as Ciro, a restaurateur and mentor figure, with Emilia Jones as Nancy, Leo Woodall as Sal and comedian Stavros Halkias as Dimitri; Rich Sommer and Dagmara Domińczyk appear in support. The production companies Star Thrower Entertainment and Zapruder Films are behind the film, with A24 distributing.

The controversy is real — but it is not what you might think

When the first trailer landed in May 2026, the reaction split. A vocal share of Bourdain’s admirers questioned whether a biopic was appropriate at all, given how openly he mocked celebrity mythmaking and how raw his death in 2018 still feels. Representative comments ran from ‘Idk if Bourdain would have wanted this’ to a resigned ‘Anthony Bourdain wouldn’t have liked this at all… however, I will be seated.’

Crucially, though, the friction is fan sentiment, not a rights fight. Bourdain’s estate publicly endorsed the film, framing its blessing around exactly the thing skeptics feared it would lack. ‘We chose to support Tony because it is not a standard biopic and doesn’t attempt to summarize a life,’ the estate said, praising the film’s rendering of ‘Tony’s complexity, his intellectual appetite and his conviction.’ In other words, the people closest to Bourdain’s legacy signed off precisely because ‘Tony’ is a portrait of a moment rather than a life.

A careful legacy

That distinction matters because Bourdain’s posthumous image has already been the subject of a public reckoning. The 2021 documentary ‘Roadrunner’ drew criticism for using artificial intelligence to recreate his voice for a handful of lines, igniting a debate about consent and the ethics of resurrecting the dead on screen. ‘Tony’ sidesteps that particular trap by not pretending to be Bourdain at all: it is a young actor playing a young man who had not yet become ‘Anthony Bourdain,’ before the fame, the persona and the weight of being a symbol.

Early reviews, which began appearing in late July, have been largely receptive to that approach, singling out Sessa’s performance and Johnson’s refusal to sand down his subject’s rough edges. Whether the wider audience embraces a Bourdain film that declines to canonize him is the open question ‘Tony’ will answer at the box office. It may be the most Bourdain-like thing about it — a story more interested in a scrappy kid in a hot kitchen than in the man on the magazine covers. It opens August 7.

Sources

•  Boston.com — estate statement on ‘Tony’: boston.com/culture/entertainment/2026/05/07/anthony-bourdain-tony-movie-2026

•  Parade — fan controversy over the trailer: parade.com/news/upcoming-biopic-trailer-tony-sparks-controversy-among-fans