The Bear Should Be Nervous
The Anthony Bourdain movie was always going to happen. The surprise is the shape of it. Tony, which opens in select theaters this Friday, August 7 before going wide on August 21, refuses everything the biopic formula demands: no gravelly voice-over, no rise-and-fall montage, no late-career impression. Instead, Matt Johnson, the director who turned a phone company into a thriller with BlackBerry, points his camera at one summer in the mid-1970s. Dominic Sessa, the breakout from The Holdovers, plays Anthony Bourdain at 19: not yet a chef, not yet a writer, a college kid washing dishes in Provincetown.
That restraint is the whole trick. Because the film never has to carry a famous life, Sessa never has to do an impression, and Collider's 8 out of 10 review praises him for exactly that, saying he plays it naturally and authentically instead. The people around him are drawn loosely on purpose: Antonio Banderas plays a mysterious veteran chef in what Collider rates one of his best performances in years, and Leo Woodall is Sal, a fellow kitchen grunt. (The review's one sour note: Emilia Jones's love interest is severely underwritten.) The result plays less like a Wikipedia page and more like a memory, which feels right for a man who spent his whole career distrusting polish.
Here is the claim worth arguing about: the kitchen-drama crown is in play. The Bear turned line-cook pressure into prestige television and has owned the genre since 2022. But Collider's review says the film plays like an episode of No Reservations or Parts Unknown mixed with The Bear, and that comparison cuts the way you would not expect. Bourdain's memoir laid the groundwork for kitchen stories like this one decades before the show existed. The movie is not chasing the show. The show has been chasing this guy all along, and now the source material has come to collect.
So run the full loop this week. See Tony on Friday. Then go to the source: Bourdain's 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, the best-selling kitchen expose the film draws from. If you want the odd footnote, the 2005 sitcom Kitchen Confidential it inspired is a one-season curio worth a look. Chase it all with The Bear, which will feel different once you know where its DNA comes from. And if it is the talent you are tracking, The Holdovers shows what Sessa can do opposite a heavyweight, while BlackBerry proves Johnson can turn process into drama. One summer, one dish pit. That is the whole movie, and that is why it works.
