Tag: HollywoodReporter

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. has issued a lengthy response after BTS announced they wouldn’t be submitting their music for Grammy consideration this year, giving his support to the group over their decision while also addressing critique toward the organization’s newly-created best Asian pop music performance category.

“I am saddened to hear that BTS has chosen not to participate in the Grammy Awards process this year, but as a music creator, I understand and respect their decision,” Mason Jr. wrote. “I do want to clarify something that seems to be getting lost in the conversation. The Asian Pop category was created to celebrate the depth, diversity and extraordinary growth of pop artistry coming out of Asia. The spirit of this new category is to shine a dedicated spotlight on these important artists.”

BTS first announced their decision on Tuesday night, sharing posts on Instagram where they said they “hope that music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language.”

The move came just over a month after the Recording Academy first introduced its new Asian pop category, which, per the Academy, “recognizes artistic excellence in Asian pop music performances originating from or widely recognized within Asian markets, including but not limited to K-pop, J-pop and C-pop, with meaningful use of one or more Asian languages. Awards are presented to the performing artist(s).”

The award had received a mixed response from fans, with some arguing the award could keep Asian acts from getting properly recognized in the general categories. In his statement, Mason Jr. said the genre categories don’t”exclude an artist from also submitting and being considered in the General Field.”

“Recognition in a genre category and recognition in the General Field are not mutually exclusive,” Mason Jr. said. “An artist can absolutely pursue both.”

Mason Jr. further wrote that the Academy adds new categories “never to divide, but to expand who is recognized by our 15,000 Grammy voters.”

“The Grammy organization is here to serve music and all the people who make it,” Mason Jr. wrote. “As we continue to expand the reach, our membership and our awards, regardless of geography or language, I want to emphasize that we will continue to listen to the global music community and work to honor and celebrate all the artists whose music moves the world.”

BTS isn’t the first act to rebuke the Grammys, as other major stars including The Weeknd, Drake and Morgan Wallen have all decided in recent years not to have their music considered as well.

Read Mason Jr.’s full statement below:

I am saddened to hear that BTS has chosen not to participate in the Grammy Awards process this year, but as a music creator, I understand and respect their decision.

I do want to clarify something that seems to be getting lost in the conversation. The Asian Pop category was created to celebrate the depth, diversity and extraordinary growth of pop artistry coming out of Asia. The spirit of this new category is to shine a dedicated spotlight on these important artists. More categories mean more artists’ work is recognized. It’s never to divide, but to expand who is recognized by our 15,000 Grammy voters.

I also want to be very clear: submitting music in a genre category such as Asian Pop, or Jazz or Country does not exclude an artist from also submitting and being considered in the General Field categories, including Record of the Year, Album of the Year and Song of the Year. Those categories remain open to any eligible recording, regardless of genre. Recognition in a genre category and recognition in the General Field are not mutually exclusive. An artist can absolutely pursue both.

The Grammy organization is here to serve music and all the people who make it. As we continue to expand the reach, our membership and our awards, regardless of geography or language, I want to emphasize that we will continue to listen to the global music community and work to honor and celebrate all the artists whose music moves the world.”

Spider-Man: Brand New Day looks to close out the month with a big swing, as Sony Pictures‘ latest superhero feature with Tom Holland and Zendaya eyes an astronomical opening weekend at the box office.

With Universal’s The Odyssey having enjoyed quite the successful box office journey without major new competition for the past two weeks, Peter Parker and his pals are poised to land the year’s biggest debut and potentially one of the top-grossing openings ever. The studio is projecting a domestic opening of $195 million from 4,300 North American theaters, which is also in line with third-party tracking services.

This would top last month’s launch for Disney‘s Toy Story 5, which opened to $159.6 million domestically, to make Spider-Man: Brand New Day the biggest debut of 2026. This would also put it in the top 10 for domestic opening weekends, topping 2019’s photorealistic The Lion King remake, which holds the No. 10 launch at $191.7 million. The last time a title opened above $200 million domestically was two years ago with Deadpool & Wolverine at $211.4 million. (The record goes to Avengers: Endgame’s wild 2019 opening of $357.1 million.)

Sony projects Spider-Man: Brand New Day to add $270 million from international markets for a global start of $465 million, including a strong showing in China. This would give it the studio’s second-best launch behind Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s heroic opening of $600.5 million in 2021, and it would best Spider-Man 3′s $381.6 million start from 2007.

Exhibitors are certainly clamoring to show director Destin Daniel Cretton‘s new Spider-Man film, which centers on the title hero living a lonely existence without his loved ones before a dangerous new foe targets him. Hailing from Sony and Marvel Studios, Brand New Day accounts for 49 percent of this weekend’s showtimes as of Wednesday, according to the Boxoffice Company, as opposed to the 22 percent that The Odyssey held when it opened two weekends ago to $124.5 million domestically for the third-biggest 2026 launch to date.

Word of mouth could push the Brand New Day opening much higher, as the film is already off to a flying start with critics. Also starring Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal and Mark Ruffalo, it holds a 91 percent approval rating from reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes. That puts it within similar range of the franchise’s other recent offerings, including 2018’s animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse at 97 percent and Spider-Man: No Way Home at 93 percent. In his review for The Hollywood Reporter, chief film critic David Rooney writes that Brand New Day “foregrounds the humanity that has always been Spidey’s greatest strength,” and he praises “a never-better Tom Holland.”

Indeed, some analysts are predicting that the buzz around the release will carry Spider-Man: Brand New Day far beyond $195 million. It remains to be seen whether the $260.1 million domestic opening sum for No Way Home, the previous live-action Spider-Man release, could potentially be within reach. Granted, that one had the benefit of the buzz surrounding the return of previous Peter Parkers in Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, not to mention that the release faced no real competition and marked the first post-COVID theatrical visit for many moviegoers who were starved for entertainment experiences.

Notably, there has been recent debate about audiences tiring of franchise offerings, given the underperformance of titles from both the superhero variety (June’s Supergirl) and otherwise (May’s The Mandalorian and Grogu). And yet, this weekend is poised to prove that the filmmaking teams have done an admirable job of handling Marvel Comics’ crown-jewel hero. As Fandango director of analytics and Box Office Theory founder Shawn Robbins tells THR, “Tom Holland, Sony and Marvel Studios’ run of films has remained remarkably fresh, thanks to thoughtful timing and stories that continue to connect with audiences in both new and familiar ways.”

He continues, “They’ve consistently met — and often exceeded — expectations, anchored by the kind of character-driven storytelling and big-screen spectacle audiences want from Spider-Man. It’s as much a gold standard as any for how to keep a massively popular character relevant and endearing to multiple generations of moviegoers.”

As for Holland, whose first leading role as the character came with 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, it appears likely that Sony will have more chances to continue its winning streak. “It has been the gift of my life,” the actor — who also appears in The Odyssey — told THR at the Brand New Day premiere in Los Angeles about playing Spidey. “I will do it for as long as they’ll have me. So if this movie does good, I guess we’ll see!” Yes, we will.

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Following an eight-season run on Vanderpump Rules and three New York Times bestsellers, Stassi Schroeder continues to carve out a name for herself with a new unscripted series about mom life, family dynamics and her ever-evolving career. House of Stassi kicks off with a two-part premiere on July 29, from 9 to 11 p.m. PT/ET on Freeform, which can be livestreamed on any streaming service that carries said network, namely DirecTV (with a five-day free trial), Fubo, Sling and Hulu + Live TV.

Alternatively, the entire eight-episode season will drop on Disney+/Hulu on Thursday, July 30, and while the streamer doesn’t offer a free trial directly, fans can get free access through any of DirecTV’s Signature packages, since they all include the Hulu and Disney+ bundle and offer a five-day free trial. This means new subscribers can watch the entire series when it drops on July 30 (and everything else the streamer has to offer) at absolutely no cost.

At a Glance: How to Watch House of Stassi

Where to Watch House of Stassi: Release Date, Air Time

House of Stassi premieres on Wednesday, July 29, at 9 p.m. PT/ET with two back-to-back episodes on Freeform. After premiere night, new hour-long episodes will air weekly on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. PT/ET on Freeform.

Where to Stream House of Stassi Online

There are a couple of ways to stream House of Stassi online. Since it airs Wednesdays on Freeform starting with the two-part premiere on July 29, episodes will also be available to watch live on any streaming service that carries the network, including DirecTV (with a five-day free trial), Fubo, Sling and Hulu + Live TV.

Alternatively, the entire first season will drop on Disney+/Hulu on Thursday, July 30, and while the streamer doesn’t offer a free trial directly, fans can get free access through any of DirecTV’s Signature packages, which include the Hulu and Disney+ bundle and offer a five-day free trial. This means new subscribers can watch the entire series when it drops on July 30 at no cost.

More on each live TV streaming option — and their new subscriber discounts — below.

Learn more about each plan option, including how to build your own channel lineup (starting at just $19.99 per month), at directv.com.

House of Stassi Cast

Main season one castmembers include Stassi Schroeder, Katie Maloney, Beau Clark, Kristina Kelly, Taylor Strecker, Georgianna Aubin, Taylor Donohue and Rob Evors.

With less than two weeks to go before the season four premiere of Reacher, Amazon Prime Video is setting the stage for what follows that batch of episodes by confirming a quartet of actors for season five.

Amanda Ip, Jay Baruchel, Ciara Bravo and Kevin Durand will star opposite Alan Ritchson as Reacher in the fifth season that will be based on Lee Child’s novel Make Me. The series — from executive producer and showrunner Nick Santora and produced by Paramount Television Studios and Amazon MGM Studios — will catch up with Ritchson’s title character after his train stops in the mysterious town of Mother’s Rest where he teams with a private investigator in the search for a missing person.

In classic Reacher fashion, he winds up uncovering a dangerous and deadly criminal conspiracy. Ip will play Michelle Chang with Baruchel taking on the role as Chief Buck Bauer. Bravo assumes the role of Eunice, and Durand will play Nokes.

Canadian actor Ip is known for a recurring role as Carmen on CTV’s medical drama Transplant. Her TV credits also include Cross, Hudson & Rex, Plan B and Guess Who. She’s repped by Characters Talent Agency.

Baruchel is a veteran actor known for a long list of credits including This Is the End, Knocked Up, She’s Out of My League, Tropic Thunder, The Trotsky, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, FUBAR, The Moodys, Man Seeking Woman, The Last Girlfriend on Earth, BlackBerry and the Oscar-winning best picture Million Dollar Baby. He voiced Hiccup in DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon and turned in multi-hyphenate work on Random Acts of Violence and Goon: Last of the Enforcers.

He can next be seen in The Stunt Driver as real-life Canadian daredevil Ken Carter opposite Ed Helms and Ben Foster. The film will have a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Baruchel repped by CAA, Thruline Entertainment and Lichter, Grossman, Nichols, Feldman, Rogal, Shikora & Clark.

Bravo’s year has included a turn in the title role opposite Zoey Deutch in Leah McKendrick’s Voicemails for Isabelle and starring opposite Marisa Tomei in You’re Dating A Narcissist!. Her other credits include Joe and Anthony Russo’s Cherry opposite Tom Holland, Small Engine Repair opposite Jon Bernthal, A Teacher alongside Kate Mara and Nick Robinson and Shawn Simmons’ Wayne. She next stars in Justin Lin’s Last Days. Bravo is repped by UTA and Myman Greenspan Fox Rosenberg Mobasser Younger & Light.

Durand is also a veteran actor with a long list of credits like Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Atom Egoyan’s The Captive opposite Ryan Reynolds, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis opposite Robert Pattinson, Resident Evil: Retribution, Shawn Levy’s Real Steel opposite Hugh Jackman, Robin Hood opposite Russell Crowe, James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma with Crowe and Christian Bale, X-Men Origins: Wolverine alongside Hugh Jackman, Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces opposite Chris Pine and Walt Becker’s Wild Hogs with John Travolta, Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence.

Other credits include the Naked Gun update, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Abigail, Ready or Not: Here I Come, Locke & Key, Swamp Thing, Ballers, The Strain, Trial & Error, Vikings and the upcoming feature The Boy in the Iron Box based on the novel by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. Durand is repped by CAA, Alchemy Entertainment and Brecheen Feldman Breimer.

As mentioned above, Reacher’s new season debuts Aug. 12, and it will be based on Child’s Gone Tomorrow. The story follows Reacher after he has a chance and disturbing encounter with a distraught stranger on the subway. Sydelle Noel, Chris Marquette, Agnez Mo, Anggun, Kevin Weisman, Marc Blucas, Kevin Corrigan and Kathleen Robertson round out the cast. In addition to Santora and Child, Ritchson serves as an executive producer on season four alongside Don Granger, Scott Sullivan, Mick Betancourt, Lisa Kussner, Sam Hill, Amy Pocha and Seth Cohen. Carolyn Harris and Kenny Madrid are executives-in-charge for Paramount Television Studios.

There is a bungee-strap battle that goes down inside a geodesic “Thunderdome” arena and, one year, revelers found a 23-foot-tall, 50-foot-long hedgehog temple erected on the playa in Nevada, where Black Rock City has risen nearly every Labor Day week for the past 40 years. And let’s not overlook the central wooden effigy itself, collapsing and engulfed in flames as steampunk Mad Max extras dance and laugh and cry.

Of all the dazzling visuals and surreal art that burst out of Burning Man, the large-scale, weeklong desert event that is now so vital that it has spawned its own subculture, it’s the images seen about seven minutes into HBO‘s The Man Will Burn that are truly surprising: Rather than “Burners” running wild in costumes and dancing in the dust, the four-part documentary opens on a boardroom, with charts indicating cash flow. And then there are the actual people who, all year long, schlep to the office and run the business of Burning Man. Here, they are arguing about how to pay for it.

If you were left wondering whether the series, which began streaming weekly on HBO Max on July 9 and concludes Thursday, was a deliberate provocation, the series’ directors, Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi, cleared that up while speaking with The Hollywood Reporter last week.

“We’re documentary filmmakers, so we’re interested in reality,” Gandhi said about the series, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June. “The whole point of Burning Man is to not think about the gifting economy and the decommodification part of it — that’s what happens out on the playa. But when you peel back the layer behind the event, that’s what’s going on. Everything has a cost.”

That tension — between a 40-year-old social experiment premised on resisting institutions and the institution it had to become to survive — is one of the many aspects of the phenomenon that The Man Will Burn interrogates. Noujaim and Gandhi spent five years filming with unprecedented access to the Burning Man Project’s leadership. They begin the journey just as the organization is faced with what Noujaim called “one of the greatest existential crises” in its history: the COVID-19 pandemic threatening the very premise the event is built upon, which is simply that people show up.

Noujaim, an Emmy winner known for The Square and The Vow, said she and Gandhi — who directed the biting and, as some argued, immoral 2011 documentary Kumaré — were drawn to the project precisely because the stakes were so undeniably real.

“Even though many of the people that put this together have very different concepts of what they want to create, they do share this belief that it should happen every year, and they feel very strongly about that,” she said. “The stakes for all of the characters that we were following were very high. And I think when that happens, the true human nature comes out — and that’s wonderful for a film.”

Producer Muriel Soenens, who came to the project as “the non-burner of the team,” as she explained to THR, said the pandemic demanded answers to questions the community had been letting linger for years.

“It basically had opened up a Pandora’s box of issues that had been plaguing them since the early days: Do we grow or not? Who does this belong to? Does this belong to anybody? And if it does, who should be leading this?” she said. “As anarchy grows in numbers, it can no longer be truly radical. It can’t be as free as it was.”

As the series barrels forward through crisis management and office politics to the chaos that rain on the playa can cause, we watch as an event built on the idea that no one is in charge is forced by circumstances to reveal who actually is.

Making The Man Will Burn land was always going to hinge on access, which took years to earn, scene by scene. The filmmakers say the Burning Man Project’s leadership — including CEO Marian Goodell, a central figure throughout the series — gave them startling latitude, including in a boardroom scene during the depths of the crisis.

“I don’t think anything was off limits from the organization,” Gandhi said. But the organization, he added, was “only a tiny part of the access” — every camp, every art-car crew, every individual required separate, often lengthy negotiation. “Sometimes we would have to talk to people for 45 minutes, or months, before shooting for five minutes,” he said.

That’s not to say Goodell herself was resistant at first, Noujaim said.

“Marian was very much like, ‘This film is not about me, it’s not about one person,’” Noujaim said. “But we really pushed forward with following her because she was at the center of any big decision that was going to be made.” The access deepened over successive years, a dynamic Gandhi described bluntly: “As you are stood up for the fifth interview, then they’ll give you the sixth, and maybe it’ll be nicer or more open than it would have been if they hadn’t stood you up five times.”

Consent, the filmmakers said, was unusually fraught for a documentary in 2026 — a rarity, Soenens noted, in the social media era, when people are eager, or at least used to being on camera.

“There is really the deep question of, do I want to be filmed,” she said, adding that some longtime attendees declined outright, believing no documentary could capture what the event actually feels like, or objecting on principle to it being filmed at all.

Of the many conundrums and debates about Burning Man, it may not be too surprising that the series’ most pointed material concerns money — specifically, the encroachment of wealthy tech figures, including Kimbal Musk, who have become entangled in Burning Man’s finances and, therefore, have a seat at the table in its governance. But Gandhi pushed back on the idea that tech wealth itself threatens the event’s spirit; tech money, he noted, has been present at Burning Man since the 1990s. The more interesting question, he said, is about participation versus consumption: “Are people going without participating and buying an experience, rather than working on the experience?”

Yet how money concentrates power is on full display here. Musk, Gandhi said, “was maybe the loudest voice in the room” during a boardroom debate over whether to cancel the event outright — a moment that crystallizes how an organization “running on debt” ends up dependent on its wealthiest members, above its founding ideals.

Noujaim framed it as an argument the film wants viewers to sit with rather than resolve.

“It’s not whether people have money or don’t have money. It’s more this question of: Are people coming in to build together, to give and to sacrifice — which enables human connection — rather than the connection we normally deal with, which is very transactional?” she said. The struggle, she adds, is real and ongoing inside the organization itself, which works to prevent “plug-and-play” camps, where wealth substitutes for participation as the wealthy parachute into Black Rock City.

Asked what they wished they could include, the filmmakers pointed to structural gaps rather than deliberate omissions. Because the series is character-driven, storylines that didn’t touch their core subjects largely fell away, even ones with some true dramatic weight. They also mention a widely reported and still-unsolved death at the event that happened the year after filming wrapped; Noujaim said she and Gandhi weren’t present for it and had only secondhand information, but it’s a thread in the story of Burning Man that shows how its growth is leading to the seeping in of chaos.

Two pursuits, they said, nearly made it into the final cut but didn’t: a ride-along with the event’s volunteer rangers, complicated by the fact that there’s no cell service on the playa to coordinate filming, and a stint at the event’s makeshift hospital, where the crew nearly captured a premature birth — HIPAA privacy rules shut the access down. Both, Gandhi said, spoke to an underappreciated reality — that Black Rock City is “a city running a city,” with real infrastructure and real emergencies behind the drugs and art and fun.

For all the institutional friction the series documents, both directors indicated that what caught them off guard wasn’t the conflict — it was the playful tone. “The humor,” Gandhi said, “the level of humor and self-deprecation that keeps it way less earnest than you would expect. They are the first to cut themselves down and question themselves and consider themselves flawed and imperfect. They don’t like calling it a utopia.”

Noujaim said she was struck by the scale and the sheer amount of volunteer labor required to build and dismantle an 80,000-person city in the desert, most of it unpaid.

“There’s nothing like it on Earth,” she said. “People put more effort into building something than most people put into their jobs — and more joy in working.” It’s a note the film leans into deliberately, she added, precisely because it pushes against what most people assume Burning Man is in reality — not a party bought and consumed, but one built, hour by unpaid hour, by those who simply show up.

After more than a decade away from film, Gregg Araki is back with I Want Your Sex, following a fresh-faced 23-year-old (Cooper Hoffman) who lands a job working for renowned artist and provocateur Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). Things quickly take a turn, though, as Erika chooses him to become her sexual muse.

The erotic comedy plays into a recent trend of projects depicting older women in relationships with younger men, including 2024’s Babygirl and a side plot in Marty Supreme. Co-writer Karley Sciortino recently wrote an op-ed about Hollywood’s love of the new age gap, and at the movie’s L.A. premiere on Tuesday, Araki explained, “In the patriarchy, that’s normal, for the pretty young thing to be with the old rich guy. As women gain more power and more income and wealth, I think that it’s great that the tables get evened out a little bit.”

Wilde — who has her own personal experience with age gap romances and the backlash that can surround them, from her time dating Harry Styles — celebrated “the fact that audiences are really open to a trend that for so long was dominated by the traditional older man, younger woman narrative. I think it’s exciting that people are breaking out of their boxes in different ways. I loved Babygirl; I think it’s exciting that people are open to different kinds of sexy love stories.”

Araki explained how he chose his central pairing, having long wanted to work with Wilde but admitting he wasn’t sure about Hoffman at first because after seeing him in Licorice Pizza, “he was so young and I was like it’s a little creepy for her to be sleeping with this kid.” After meeting him, though, Araki was impressed by how Hoffman “has a lot of gravitas for somebody so young;” Hoffman explained in signing on, “I would be really shocked if people said no to this opportunity. It’s Gregg, it’s Olivia, it’s a wild sex movie — that feels so exciting to me, rather than something that’s boring and dull.”

Wilde’s character in particular is very far from dull, with the star saying, “Madonna was a major source of inspiration, specifically the Truth or Dare documentary” and how she was “singular in her determination to stay true to herself and completely not giving a single fuck about if people didn’t approve of her.”

The performance is also a big departure from her buzzy performance in The Invite, her other relationship comedy that came out this summer. “It’s wild because these two characters are the two kind of sides of my personality. I love that they’re so different but they’re really in the same conversation about intimacy and growing up,” Wilde said. “The Invite is about growing up into a different stage of life, I think; this one is really about adolescence and the idea of maturing into an adult and what it means to experiment and the importance of experimenting.”

I Want Your Sex, which also stars Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho and Daveed Diggs, hits theaters on Friday.

Lynette Howell Taylor was re-elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood’s Oscars-dispensing organization, by its board of governors at a meeting on Wednesday morning, the organization just announced.

Howell Taylor, an Oscar-nominated film producer whose credits include both acclaimed indies (among them 2006’s Half Nelson, 2010’s Blue Valentine and 2016’s Captain Fantastic) and blockbuster studio films (such as 2018’s A Star Is Born, for which she received a best picture Oscar nomination), was first elected to the presidency a year ago. The 47-year-old, who, like the Beatles, hails from Liverpool, England, is the 37th person to hold the office.

Howell Taylor joined the Academy in 2014 and was recruited to produce the 2020 Oscars telecast with Stephanie Allain. Later that same year, she was elected to represent the producers branch on the board of governors, and was re-elected to a second term three years later. Term limits require governors, after six consecutive years of service, to step away from the board for at least one year, so Howell Taylor is no longer a governor of the producers branch — but the board recently passed a bylaw amendment to allow a sitting Academy president to run for re-election to that role until they have served up to four consecutive one-year terms, with the goal of providing greater consistency and continuity to the board. So she remains on the board as an “ex oficio governor” — a voting member representing the Academy, not a specific branch.

Also elected by the board to 2026-2027 officer positions:

Barber, Fox, Phillips and Rodman were re-elected as officers; Dinerstein was elected for the first time.

“We are so deeply grateful to Lynette, Lesley, David, Jennifer, Lou and Howard for their commitment to the Academy and to our global film community,” Academy CEO Bill Kramer said in a statement. “As we move toward our 100th anniversary, I am excited to continue our vital work with the board and these exceptional board officers to support our members, the industry and the Academy’s mission and programs.”

Anyone who ever read Anthony Bourdain’s books, watched one of his globe-hopping culinary travel series or even just sat down to a mouth-watering plate of steak frites at Manhattan’s Brasserie Les Halles during his tenure there as executive chef probably has an idea of the man behind the self-made success. His bluntly unfiltered storytelling and conversational style, his passion and curiosity as a cultural explorer, his eloquence in the language of food and even his amusing bad-boy arrogance were all part of a larger-than-life, unapologetically authentic personality. Almost a decade after his shocking suicide by hanging, Bourdain remains an iconic figure as both celebrity chef and accidental anthropologist.

Matt Johnson’s Tony is a prologue to all that, tightly focused on the pivotal summer the rudderless 19-year-old Bourdain spent in Provincetown in 1975, washing dishes in a seafood joint, where he stumbled onto his vocation, right before enrolling in the Culinary Institute of America. It’s a lovely grace note that Bourdain’s friend and colleague for more than 20 years, Eric Ripert, is on the admissions panel in a brief scene.

A slender slice of a famous life, the movie feels a little wispy in its mix of scrappy and sweet, rough-edged and yet bathed in the balming glow of nostalgia. But it has an idiosyncratic charm that fits the title character, without ever sanding down the abrasive side of a chronic liar or masking his insecurities. 

Making good on his promise in The Holdovers, Dominic Sessa is excellent in the role, nailing the contradictory aspects of a slippery character while mapping his coming-of-age arc with empathy and honesty. There’s no dark foreshadowing of the tragedy we know will come 43 years later — only chutzpah, raw potential and intermittent flickers of vulnerability.

Working from an original script by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, Johnson and regular producing and writing partner Matthew Miller — they collaborated on 2023’s BlackBerry and this year’s mockumentary Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie, among other projects — reshaped the perspective to capture the interiority of the unformed Bourdain. We meet the title character as a lost young man, trying to figure out who he wants to be, but putting up a façade of brash self-assurance in the meantime.

Even on a visit to his childhood home in New Jersey, Tony — the more serious, grown-up “Anthony” comes later — reads as a narcissistic blowhard with his parents, warmly affectionate Pierre (Rich Sommer) and flinty Gladys (Dagmara Dominczyk), who seems to view their eldest son with a look of preemptive disappointment. He applies for a paid writing fellowship at Vassar, pitching a novel that sounds like he’s making it up during the interview. Despite that, Tony is so sure he aced it he starts sharing the news that he has secured the fellowship, continuing even after he is informed that it went to another candidate.

We hear the word “bildungsroman” at least four times in the early scenes, as if the writers felt the need to spell out their intentions in a bio-drama that is less a portrait of a life than of a transitional moment.

At a student-hangout bar one night, he spots Nancy (Emilia Jones), his former high school crush and — subsequent to the period covered in the movie — future wife, sitting with friends, including a snarky cousin who instantly tags Tony as a shameless bullshitter. But Nancy is mildly intrigued, telling him she will be spending the summer in Provincetown but inviting him to come find her in the fall at Vassar.

With his plans for the summer nixed, Tony lifts a handful of cash from his dad’s wallet and impulsively follows Nancy to the former fishing port on the tip of Cape Cod. It doesn’t take him long to find her, working a pizzeria counter, but he’s crushed to see her kissing a horny co-worker (Joe Burns).

Tony tries drowning his sorrows at the bar of the Flagship, a no-frills seafood eatery run by a man identified only as Chef (Antonio Banderas). But when he comes on strong with bartender-waitress Mary (Monica Raymund), he gets thrown out and roughed up by Sal (Leo Woodall), the oyster-shucking bruiser from the kitchen.

With a black eye and an empty wallet, Tony decides to leave on the next morning’s ferry, but a chance encounter with Nancy changes his mind. He continues to lie about the writing fellowship and assure her that she has nothing to do with his reasons for being there. Whether Nancy buys it or not, she invites him to a party that night at the house she’s sharing with her girlfriends.

Meanwhile, Tony meets the Flagship chef again, this time on less hostile terms. Soulfully played by Banderas as a contemplative man who attends Mass in Portuguese every Sunday — a nod to the town’s early immigrant fisherman community — and maintains an air of mystery about what brought him to Provincetown, Chef offers Tony a job washing dishes and a place to crash, sleeping on a hammock on the deck of his beach house. 

Tony also finds Sal tagging along to Nancy’s party and watches morosely as she drifts off with the pizza dude while Sal literally carves a notch in a bedroom door frame following what appears to be just the latest in an endless succession of quickie hookups.

So begins a summer of education, chastening disaster and eventual redemption for the fledgling super-chef, who’s no innocent but not yet a confident adult who knows what he wants, either. Basically, he’s just faking it as he goes along.

A big part of Tony’s experience is his unexpected friendship with Sal, a brawler who’s never slow to start throwing punches, eager to consume whatever drugs are available and whose louche charms and sexy smile are catnip to women. This is a terrific role for Woodall, with shades of his party-boy hustler in season two of The White Lotus, Sal’s loose-cannon volatility balanced by surprising loyalty to Tony.

The more instructive part, however, is Tony’s time in the chaotic Flagship kitchen, where Chef turns a blind eye to the cocaine and weed circulating but has strict rules about timekeeping and efficiency. When Sal inevitably screws up, Tony gets promoted to oyster shucker, suddenly finding himself part of an alternate family, with fellow kitchen staffers Stavros (comedian Stavros Halkias) and Tyrone (Michael Jibrin), and Mary running front of house.

This central plot thread is almost like a blueprint for the behind-the-scenes access to restaurant life in Bourdain’s bestselling first book, Kitchen Confidential — hazardous, intense, messy and a magnet for misfits. It seems true to the title character as drawn here that he would thrive in such a high-pressure environment, especially under the exacting mentorship of Chef. 

We also get a glimpse of Bourdain as someone who runs toward a challenge, entrepreneurial in his proposal to Chef that they introduce a Friday-night lobster thermidor special, which he wants to prepare, undaunted by the limitations of his culinary education. Banderas’ character is well past his ambitious years, having done his time in Michelin-starred restaurants all over Europe. But his avuncular encouragement of Tony in what could be absolute folly brings real heart to this section — until calamity intrudes.

The relatively weak link in the script is Nancy, who’s too underdeveloped as a character to give her burgeoning romance with Tony much structure, and consequently gives Jones (CODA) little to work with. She’s cool and attractive, but not much more, even if her slow-burning interest in Tony suggests she’s drawn to his weirdo vibe.

Johnson shows a light touch with the period needle drops (Eric Burdon and the Animals, Richard and Linda Thompson, Kool & the Gang, etc.). But Walter Murphy’s classical-goes-disco banger “A Fifth of Beethoven” is the most dynamic of them, punching up the energy for Tony’s Icarus-like rise and fall — even if the single wasn’t released until a year after the movie’s timeframe. Elsewhere, sharp use is made of a playful score by longtime Johnson collaborator Jay McCarrol, with sleepy piano passages echoing underlying notes of melancholy.

The production and costume designs capture the mid-’70s with pleasing understatement, and Johnson’s fondness for pop culture humor is evident in quirky asides like a passing shot of the nearby Wellfleet Drive-In signage, showing the seemingly incongruous double-feature pairing of Jaws with the Charles Bronson crime thriller Violent City. The ultimate Cape Cod movie, Jaws was first released that year and became a defining cultural moment of summer 1975, while Violent City was a favorite of Bourdain’s, its Ennio Morricone title track in high rotation on his cooking playlists.

The soft pink glaze of the Cape Cod light (gorgeously captured by DP Michael Bauman, fresh off his Oscar-nominated work on One Battle After Another) gives the film an atmospheric luster that helps fortify the somewhat ambling nature of the narrative. Enough of the shoot was done in Provincetown itself to provide a warm evocation of the popular Massachusetts summertime destination, even if the movie could almost be accused of straight-washing its picturesque setting.

While P-town’s explosion as an LGBTQ mecca came later, the roots of its gravitational pull for queer tourism by all accounts were readily apparent in the post-Stonewall years. Making the Flagship’s Mary and her partner the only same-sex couple we catch a glimpse of feels like tokenism. But hey, local institution Spiritus Pizza, where Nancy works, still operates today, often fondly referred to as “Slut Pizza” because of the throng of gay men that converge there every night at 1 a.m. when the bars close, many of them madly swiping left on Grindr. I guess that will have to count as representation.