“But I like you…”
It felt like there was a huge surge of love for Matt Johnson at the beginning of the year and now I’m seeing a lot of pointed criticisms of not just his work but character. I wonder if these barbed takes are coming from a place of good faith or not, but it’s an interesting shift in the court of public opinion. As someone who discovered his work this year, from the brilliant Nirvanna the Band the Show in all three of its incarnations (a late 00s web series, two seasons of a full bore TV version in the late 2010s and the brilliant Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie from 2025) to films like Operation Avalanche (2016) and Blackberry (2023), I’ve kind of taken a crash course in his life and work from over the past twenty years. His inability to apologise for offensive remarks he’s made in his filmmaking when he was younger seems to be the sticking point for most, but as someone who also said a lot of stupid shit when I was a kid, I understand the stance.
Because I know, as Matt seems to recognise in himself, that wildly offensive stuff I said when I was in my late teens and early 20s really came from the shock humour culture that you found yourself assimilated into back then. Don’t get me wrong, I would occasionally make jokes in poor taste, whereas others I knew made entire personalities out of it. In a way I regret some of those things but I also know where they came from, and don’t judge myself too harshly. It seems a lot of people today desire grandstanding apologies for any transgression that can be possibly found.
I only talk about this because it’s so interesting to see Matt Johnson’s latest film Tony (2026) focusing on a summer in the life of a young Anthony Bourdain, which ends up feeling more like an unravelling of Matt’s own late teenage psyche. His characters in works like The Dirties (2013) and Nirvana the Band The Show are slick talking, plan concocting deceivers who thrive on scheming and a form of roleplaying almost. There’s a small sense of Matt running away from his own shadow by creating his own worlds and versions of himself throughout everything he’s made, and in Tony, we see a more measured version of that. Stripped of his usual meta narrative style, he focuses on Anthony Bourdain (as portrayed in this film, at least) and his compulsion to lie and avoid being himself.
There’s a kind of inner pain that’s painted across Dominic Sessa’s face throughout a lot of the film that’s never fully unfurled, and I appreciated that aspect of the script, co-written with Matthew Miller. Tony is messy in a refreshing kind of way and Matt’s usual sense of economy in storytelling really works well for a film like this. It’s predictable but breezy, a little raw, and never quite gives in to the kind of maudlin tone that finding your way stories are often glazed with.
Leo Woodall and Antonio Banderas excel in colourful roles here, and while I adored Emilia Jones in CODA (2021), I do have to admit that her love interest character felt more like an idea than a person. Matt doesn’t seem particularly compelled by featuring or writing female characters, which I think is fine up to a point, but I would like to see him explore that weakness down the line. At the very least she injected a strong and solid wit to the part, and there was a genuine chemistry between her and Dominic that carries that branch of the story through a little thin-ness.
Connie told me she feels weirdly proud of Matt for making a film like this (she’s gone through his whole filmography along with me) and I have to agree, even though his personality is kind of all over it and Anthony Bourdain feels like more than a little bit of a self insert, without a lot of his typical reality blending tools… he’s still got the juice. A friend of mine got fed up with me talking about Matt’s work earlier in the year, and quipped that I’d fully joined “The Matt Johnson Cult,” to the point that he even had a dream about meeting Matt in a hotel and being initiated into said cult. I may be guilty of fawning over his films a bit too much, but from Nirvana to Tony, there is an undeniable energy that he seems to inject into everything he does. And I very much vibe with that energy.
He really needs to let go of the F slur though, it really shouldn’t become a calling card… and yet I’m certain he put it in Tony precisely because it’s a frowned upon word, and in his own sort of Canadian Peter Pan way, he’s still a rebellious, outcast kid deep down. While his films and skills as a director and storyteller are clearly maturing, it’s clear that Matt Johnson still hasn’t fully grown up yet, but maybe he shouldn’t have to.
