Dominic Sessa As Anthony Bourdain Biopic , Inside A24’s Bold Take on the Chef’s Forgotten Summer

The first thing to note about the Tony trailer, which A24 discreetly released on May 5, is that it doesn’t appear to be the Bourdain biopic that people were anticipating. There are no leather jackets in airport lounges, no Vietnamese noodle vendors, and no Parts Unknown roofs.

Rather, it begins in 1975 in the kitchen of a modest seafood restaurant, where a 19-year-old boy is first exposed to a working line. Dominic Sessa, a young actor whose face most people first recognized from The Holdovers two and a half years ago, plays the child. The question that looms over the project is whether that pairing is successful.

Everyone keeps returning to this casting decision. Even years after his passing in 2018, Bourdain continues to be a certain kind of cultural icon, the kind of person people feel they know firsthand. Sessa’s selection first caused controversy in the culinary media community since he doesn’t resemble the lanky, hawk-eyed adult Bourdain that everyone is familiar with. There is an inherent aversion to anyone attempting to inhabit him on film.

However, that appears to be part of director Matt Johnson’s risk. He is not attempting to replicate the popularity of Bourdain of Kitchen Confidential or the subsequent years on television. Before all of that, in the version that Bourdain himself wrote about with the greatest passion, he’s reaching for the child—the moment a Vassar dropout entered a Provincetown kitchen and declared he wanted in.

The tone of the movie can be inferred from the supporting cast. On paper, Antonio Banderas’ casting as the older mentor chef seems outrageously off-key, but upon closer inspection, it makes a bizarre kind of logic. In keeping with the romantic mythos Bourdain created around the chefs who molded him, Banderas offers a kind of worn, magnetic force.

The kitchen staff is completed by Leo Woodall and Stavros Halkias, and the teaser implies that the film delves deeply into the anarchic camaraderie that Bourdain spent his career attempting to depict in writing. The tiny cruelties of a brigade system, the scent of frying oil, and the burn marks on forearms were all hinted at rather than overtly displayed.

Sessa’s own journey has been intriguing. He was almost unintentionally cast in The Holdovers after being discovered while attending Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He has the unique profile of an actor whose whole career resume might fit on one index card.

In June 2025, he was seen on set sporting a complete 1970s outfit, longer hair, and a slight hunch, displaying the obvious self-consciousness of a young actor attempting to play a man he’s only ever seen on YouTube videos. More than anything else, how the movie is received will likely depend on whether he blends into the part or stays obviously Sessa-doing-Bourdain.

Here, a broader framework is worth clinging to. Since the Roadrunner issue in 2021, when AI-generated voice replication sparked a public debate about the boundaries of posthumous depictions, Bourdain biopics and documentaries have been a sensitive topic.

By portraying Tony as an interpretation rather than a biography and concentrating on a little-known part, A24 seems to be trying to avoid that pitfall. It’s difficult not to consider how Bourdain’s most ardent fans will react to it, especially the readers who hold Kitchen Confidential in the same regard that some people do On the Road or Just Kids.

The trailer is initiating a dispute, which is what trailers should do. Sessa was the wrong choice, according to some. Others are subtly intrigued. Watching the preliminary material gives the impression that the movie might end up somewhere unexpected, neither the cynical commercial product that would cause Bourdain to walk out nor the worshipful tribute that his admirers fear. What Johnson has really created behind the teaser, which won’t be seen until later this year, will determine whether or not that hope is realized.