DOMINIC Sessa is 23, but he’s already building a career with one foot planted firmly in the 1970s — the hair, the hum, the haze, the whole thing. After his breakthrough turn as the prickly Angus Tully in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning The Holdovers, he’s now taking on one of the most mythologised origin stories in modern food culture: Anthony Bourdain, before the fame, before the legend, before the glare.

According to a new report, Sessa plays the 19-year-old Bourdain in Tony, a biopic that narrows its focus to a single summer in 1975. The setting is Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Bourdain spends the season bumming around a coastal resort town — falling in love, scrubbing pans in a seafood joint, and catching the cooking bug that would later define his life.

It’s a tight frame for a big personality: one summer as the pressure-cooker prologue. The film’s Bourdain isn’t introduced as a polished TV figure or a fully formed “bad-boy chef”. Instead, the story sits in that messy, formative space where a young man stumbles into the thing he didn’t yet know would consume him.

The project also leans into the cultural pull of Bourdain’s later reputation: he would go on to become a celebrity chef, a bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential, and the host of a hit TV spin-off. Tony may be about a particular moment, but it’s inevitably shadowed by what audiences already associate with the name.

For Sessa, it’s another trip into a decade he’s already helped resurrect on screen. The Holdovers wasn’t just set in 1970 — it was styled to feel like it had been made then, complete with a faded palette and artificial crackles on the print. With Tony, Sessa returns to the same era, but swaps boarding-school malaise for a seaside summer and the clang of a working kitchen.

There’s something deliciously specific about an actor with only five films to his name already becoming a kind of 70s specialist. It’s not nostalgia as wallpaper; it’s a choice. And in an industry addicted to maximal backstory, Tony’s decision to bottle Bourdain’s spark into a single season feels like the boldest move of all.