As the booming success of Michael reminds us, biopics might be the most rigid and uncomplicated of film genres. Portray the subject as a morally-upright genius, hit a couple of big points from Wikipedia, and include lots of stuff that people love to reward the audience for their very good taste. Throw it all on screen and watch the box office numbers grow.
Some of that shows up in the first trailer for Tony, the A24 biopic about chef and author Anthony Bourdain. We get glimpses of his struggles as a writer, failing to get a Fellowship and then taking a job in a kitchen only out of financial desperation. He talks to a pretty girl (Emilia Jones), gets hazed by the kitchen staff (including The White Lotus‘ Leo Woodall and comedian Stavros Halkias), and studies under an exacting but brilliant mentor (Antonio Banderas). And, of course, the trailer has snippets of him doing what made him famous, finding the perfect phrase to describe the experience of eating.
And yet, there’s something different about the tone of Tony, highlighted by the way the trailer highlights the artifice of the story. When Bourdain, played by The Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa, identifies the proceedings as a “coming of age” story, or when Jones asks if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, one gets the sense that Tony‘s doing something messier and more aware than the standard biopic.
That suspicion only intensifies when you realize that Tony comes from director Matt Johnson. Johnson’s acclaimed comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is still making the rounds in theaters around North America but he also directed the 2023 biopic BlackBerry.
Like Air, Tetris, and Flamin’ Hot that same year, BlackBerry is a corporate biopic, the story of a product more than a person: in this case, the titular personal assistant device. But where most corporate biopics treat executives as true geniuses who deliver heroic boardroom pitches, BlackBerry treats its central characters as either screw-ups who don’t know how to realize their ideas or, in the case of Glenn Howerton’s sociopathic take on investor Jim Balsillie, insanely ineffective alpha males.
In other words, Johnson’s idiosyncratic and unpretentious approach to biopics makes him the perfect person to document the life of Anthony Bourdain, a man who famously had little patience for pretense. Bourdain became a household name not just because he took viewers of his shows to secret places in the world and shared their cuisine. Rather, he mattered because he managed to describe the specifics of the food in a way that felt universal, using meals as a way to draw attention to the people who made it.
Obviously, Tony won’t be the story of the iconoclast with the close-cropped silver hair who we all knew. But to show us how he got there, Tony cannot follow the standard biopic trail, and Johnson is exactly the type of person to help blaze a new path.
Tony arrives in theaters in August 2026.
