There is a Canadian director no one has ever heard of, and just in the past three years he has made three of the most interesting and unexpected pictures of our time. His name is Matt Johnson, and the three movies are Blackberry from 2023, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie from 2025, and Tony, just out this weekend. Blackberry, which I thought was the best film of that year, tells the story of Research in Motion, the firm that made the Blackberry mobile device.
A modest picture made for $5 million, co-written and directed by Johnson (who also plays a major role), Blackberry has the feel of one of those character-driven indies usually filmed in a house over the course of a weekend. But it takes place over a 10-year time period and succeeds brilliantly in depicting the rise and fall of a revolutionary product whose makers did not know how to capitalize on the device’s brilliance. It is among the very best depictions of the workings of a major business ever put on screen, and it was a calling card to the big time for the then-37-year-old Johnson, who had previously labored in relative obscurity in Toronto.
Nirvanna is an ingenious and indefinable comic romp about two loser would-be rockers whose only goal in life is to get booked at a Toronto club called the Rivoli. There’s never been anything like it. It takes a 20-year-old web series Johnson made about the two slackers (who never, ever get to the Rivoli) and a 10-year-old TV series with the same characters (ditto) and stitches footage of both together with present-day material about the guys in their 40s through a Back to the Future time travel plot. It has its longueurs, but it’s astonishingly inventive.
Now comes Tony, and it is an annunciation: Matt Johnson has arrived. Take my word for it; this movie will be nominated for a bunch of Oscars, including for Johnson as writer and director. Just as Blackberry reinvented the business movie, Tony is a reinvention of the biopic. It is a snapshot of a famous person’s life set over the course of three months in the summer of 1975—and it proves not only to be a masterful character study of a problematic man but a vivid portrait (like Blackberry) of the inner workings of a functioning business.
Tony is Anthony Bourdain, the New York chef who turned himself into a legend with the publication of Kitchen Confidential, his peerless evocation of what really goes on behind the kitchen doors of America’s restaurants. We meet Tony at the end of his sophomore year at Vassar as he seeks a fellowship from the college that will provide him money to write a novel over the summer. He is brash and self-confident in an off-putting way he doesn’t know is off-putting. He tells the fellowship committee his aim is to produce a merger of George Orwell’s novel/memoir Down and Out in Paris and London with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, then brags to a friend that he just made the idea up on the spot.
The committee sees through him and gives the fellowship to someone else, but he tells everyone from his family to his friends that he got the prize anyway. Then he steals money from his father’s wallet and hies himself off to Cape Cod, because a girl he has a crush on has told him that’s where she is going to be.
A drunken Tony makes a threatening pass at a waitress in a restaurant and is beaten senseless. As he lies unconscious in a Provincetown street, he is robbed and finds himself penniless on the Cape. The restaurant owner, known only as Chef and played by Antonio Banderas in the performance of a lifetime, takes pity on him and shleps Tony to his house, where he deposits the kid in a hammock to sleep it off. Desperate to keep his distance from his ever-squabbling New Jersey parents and to make time with the girl in P-town, he asks Chef to let him stay in the hammock and work for free in Chef’s restaurant.
Chef wakes him every morning by pouring a pot of sea water over Tony’s head. This rough treatment mirrors the restaurant’s frenzied day-to-day action, as Tony interacts with and begins to learn his trade from the foul-mouthed, loud-mouthed, coke-addled kitchen staffers under Chef’s tutelage.
As people already know from the FX series The Bear, few spaces are as inherently dramatic as a restaurant kitchen. The quarters are tight, the possibility of serious injury is present at every moment, and the intensity of the work never abates. You understand why these jobs have helped turn Tony’s fellow underlings into lowlife inebriates and junkies, and why they are the only kinds of people Chef can employ because they are the only ones who could tolerate the work.
And work, real work, real hard work, is what Tony, the BS artist on the make, learns how to do over the course of this summer—and also, in Johnson’s subtle hands, how he learns to take responsibility for his mistakes and rectify them. Tony is never admirable, and never especially likable; he lies too easily, pouts a little too much, and doesn’t seem to have much in the way of an ethical code. But the magnetic young actor Dominic Sessa, who was so sharp and moving in The Holdovers with Paul Giamatti a few years ago, imbues Tony with a core of sadness and hunger that makes his missteps understandable and even something one can sympathize with. They also provide us with a haunting flash view of the tragic aspect of Bourdain’s character, which would lead to his eventual suicide 43 years after the summer of 1975.
The movie makes no mention of Bourdain’s sorry end, not even in end titles that inform us he went on to run the wonderful New York City bistro Les Halles before publishing Kitchen Confidential and achieving a level of fame on television no celebrity chef had ever reached before. This is not a sad tale, nor is it a Rocky-like triumph of the spirit. This is a quiet, keenly observed, and almost perfectly realized story about how to grow up.
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