A loose adaptation of just a few pages from the memoir that made Anthony Bourdain famous, Tony is a triumph of warm, earthy, character-centered filmmaking on a modest scale. Writer-director Matt Johnson (BlackBerry, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie) focuses the film on one fateful summer in 1975, when glowering, disaffected nineteen-year-old Tony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) gets his start in restaurant work as a lowly dishwasher in a Cape Cod seafood joint.

This film will make a great double feature with Alexander Payne’s delightful Christmas movie The Holdovers (2023). Both star the highly talented Dominic Sessa as a troubled teen acting out furiously while coming of age in the 1970s, and both center on brief but intense vacation interludes when a small cluster of characters, pushed together by circumstances, forge unexpectedly important and memorable relationships.

The Holdovers is about a group of boarding school kids whose rich parents don’t bring them home for the holidays, leaving them in the charge of a crusty, isolated, misanthropic middle-aged teacher (Paul Giamatti) who gradually becomes an unexpectedly valued mentor. In Tony, the mentor figure is the self-contained middle-aged “Chef” Jose Vatel (Antonio Banderas), who’s the owner of the seafood joint called the Flagship and the representative of the local Portuguese fishing community in Provincetown, whose traditions have waned over time. He employs a motley crew of cooks: charismatic young hard case Sal (Leo Woodall), garrulous shit-stirrer Stavros (Stavros Halkias), and silent, middle-aged, ultracompetent Tyrone (Michael Jibrin).