Matt Johnson's biopic Tony arrives as the Toronto director's second theatrical release this year

Matt Johnson, the Toronto director closest to being Canadian cinema's enfant terrible, has a major release today: Tony, a biopic of chef Anthony Bourdain produced by A24 and filmed in the U.S. It marks his second feature to get theatrical distribution this year. In February, his indie mockumentary Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opened after a rapturous debut at SXSW 2025, following two bumbling musicians unable to land a show at the Rivoli. That film, which also stars Johnson himself, catapulted him from hometown hero to internationally-acclaimed director and spawned an obsessive online fandom.

Tony is a dramatically different work: a much more polished and meditative portrait of Bourdain before fame. Set in Provincetown over the summer of 1975, it captures the young cook's blustering, braggadocious spirit well before he worked as head chef at Les Halles, wrote Kitchen Confidential, or became the world-famous culinary tourist eating $6 noodles in Vietnam with Barack Obama. It's a portrait of the artist as a young fuck-up that somehow, despite not acknowledging Bourdain's later struggles with addiction and eventual death by suicide, rings true.

Johnson admitted to not knowing much about Bourdain before signing on. "I connected with the actor cast to play him, Dominic Sessa," Johnson said. "He and I met and realized that we see the world in similar ways to Bourdain even though we're all from different generations. I felt like we had enough in common to add to his story."

When asked about those commonalities, Johnson was candid about the personal nature of the connection. "The answer is so personal that it's hard to talk about in an interview. In some ways, the movie is trying to answer that question. It comes from a shared sense of feeling like we needed to lie in order to have any value. It's also how we dealt with our mothers, in both positive and negative ways."

Johnson immersed himself in Bourdain's writing to prepare. "I read everything he ever wrote," he said. "The script came from a combination of me pulling things out of his writing and interviewing people in Provincetown to try to figure out what exactly happened the summer he lived there in 1975. I loved Kitchen Confidential. I thought it was unbelievable. My favourite chapter was 'A Day in the Life of a Chef.' I think his charm comes through almost better on the page than it does onscreen."

Music plays a central role in Johnson's filmmaking. A montage in Tony set to Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" is particularly striking. Johnson credited his editor Curt Lobb for pushing the choice. "Typically, I pick all the songs in my movies in conjunction with Curt Lobb and Bobby Upchurch, my editors," Johnson explained. "But in this case, Curt really wanted to use the song and I was against it. It was only when he showed me the entire sequence together that I was like, 'Oh my god, you've created something magical.' So Curt gets almost all the credit for that specific cue. I didn't kill it."

With two releases in six months and growing international recognition, Johnson is solidifying his reputation as a filmmaker committed to telling distinctly Canadian stories—even when those stories venture south of the border.