A24’s upcoming Anthony Bourdain movie, Tony, sounds like the rare biopic designed for someone like me.
Bourdain was sharp, restless and self-aware, which makes him easy to admire and hard to dramatize. The wrong movie could flatten him into the usual cradle-to-grave prestige drama: childhood wound, early failure, big break, public collapse, closing title cards. Too many biopics move like museum tours with screenplays, making the person less interesting the harder they try to explain them.
But Tony looks like it may be taking the smarter route, as you can see in the trailer below. Instead of trying to cover Bourdain’s entire life, the film focuses on one summer when he was 19 years old and entering the restaurant world that would help shape the chef, writer and traveler he later became.
Directed by Matt Johnson and starring Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Bourdain, the film focuses on a formative summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Bourdain stumbles into restaurant work before becoming the chef, writer and television host millions came to know. A24 describes the film as the story of a young Bourdain entering “the chaotic world of a restaurant kitchen,” a narrow approach that may avoid the usual biopic trap of covering everything.
That got me thinking about biopics that work because they do something stranger than summarize a life. Here are nine overlooked or under-discussed biographical films worth revisiting.
Stan & Ollie (2018)
This gentle, bruised film about comedy legends Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy is not about the height of fame. That is what makes it work. Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly play the duo late in their career, touring Britain while old resentments and worn-out bodies trail behind them.
Instead of turning Laurel and Hardy into marble statues, Stan & Ollie find them after the applause has started to thin. It is a movie about friendship, work and what performers owe each other after the public has moved on.
Stan & Ollie is streaming free on Tubi.
I, Tonya (2017)
I, Tonya revisits the Tonya Harding story through a fractured, darkly comic look at fame, class and public judgment. Photo courtesy of NEON
I, Tonya, understand that biography is often a fight over who gets believed. Margot Robbie plays Tonya Harding in a film that refuses to turn her story into a clean morality play.
The movie is funny, ugly and mean in the right ways. It knows that American media loves building villains out of class resentment, bad hair and bad timing. It is not interested in sainthood. It is interesting in the machinery that decides who gets treated as respectable.
I, Tonya is streaming free on Tubi.
42 (2013)
42 is more traditional than some films on this list, but Chadwick Boseman’s performance as Jackie Robinson gives it weight. The film follows Robinson’s breaking of Major League Baseball’s color barrier, with Harrison Ford playing Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey.
It is a big, polished studio biopic, but sometimes that old-fashioned shape works. Robinson’s discipline under pressure still lands, especially for viewers who understand what it means to carry more than your own ambition into hostile rooms.
42 is available to purchase or rent on Amazon Prime Video.
Bernie (2011)
Richard Linklater’s Bernie turns a strange Texas true-crime story into one of the more unusual American biopics. Photo credit: Millennium Entertainment
Photo credit: Millennium Entertainment
Richard Linklater’s Bernie is one of the strangest American biopics because it plays like a true-crime story told by a small town that cannot quite decide what it believes.
Jack Black plays Bernie Tiede, a beloved Texas mortician convicted of killing wealthy widow Marjorie Nugent. The movie mixes dramatization with interviews, creating something closer to local folklore than standard biography. It is funny until it is not, then funny again in a way that feels faintly cursed.
Bernie is streaming with an Amazon Prime subscription.
First Man (2018)
First Man follows Neil Armstrong through grief, risk and the national effort to reach the moon. Photo credit: Universal Pictures
Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong film is one of the best movies ever made about national achievement as private grief.
Ryan Gosling plays Armstrong not as a square-jawed icon, but as a quiet, locked-down man moving through loss, danger and duty. For military and aviation audiences, First Man has a particular charge. It understands test pilots, risk, engineering and the emotional cost of being the person who does the impossible while everyone else turns it into a slogan.
First Man is streaming free on YouTube.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford examines the last days of the outlaw’s life and the myth that formed around him. Photo credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is less a traditional biopic than an autopsy of American mythmaking. Brad Pitt plays Jesse James near the end of his life, already half-man and half-legend, while Casey Affleck plays Robert Ford as the young admirer desperate to stand close enough to fame that some of it might rub off on him.
The film works because it is not interested in turning Jesse James into a folk hero or Robert Ford into a simple villain. It is about what happens when celebrity, violence and envy get tangled together until nobody can tell the difference between admiration and possession. For a movie about an outlaw, it feels less like a shootout than a slow funeral for the stories America tells about dangerous men.
Dolemite Is My Name (2019)
Dolemite Is My Name follows performer Rudy Ray Moore as he creates the Dolemite character and pushes his way into independent filmmaking. Photo credit: Netflix
Eddie Murphy’s Dolemite Is My Name is a movie about making art when nobody is coming to rescue you.
Murphy plays Rudy Ray Moore, the comedian and performer who created the Dolemite character and muscled his way into filmmaking. The film is joyful without being soft. It is about hustle, embarrassment, bad sets, weird dreams and the stubborn belief that an audience exists somewhere if you can just get the thing in front of them.
Dolemite Is My Name is streaming with a Netflix subscription.
The Founder (2016)
The Founder is the anti-inspirational business biopic. Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc, the man who turned McDonald’s from a small restaurant operation into an empire.
The movie works because it does not pretend Kroc is heroic. He is fascinating, hungry and deeply unpleasant. It is a film about American ambition with the varnish scraped off, which makes it far more useful than another story about a visionary genius who simply wanted it more.
The Founder is available to stream on Netflix.
The Wind Rises (2013)
Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises offers a poetic portrait of aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi and the uneasy relationship between invention and war. Photo credit: Studio Ghibli / Touchstone Pictures
Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is a poetic and morally uneasy portrait of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer behind the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane.
It is not a standard biopic, and that is why it lingers. The film is about beauty, invention and the horror of seeing dreams conscripted by war. For military audiences, that tension gives it unusual power. It asks what happens when a person’s gift becomes part of a machine much larger than himself.
The Wind Rises is streaming on HBO Max.
Biopics are at their best when they stop trying to explain an entire life and instead find the one pressure point that makes a person visible. That is why Tony has my attention. Maybe the best way to approach Anthony Bourdain is not through the icon, but through the young man before the icon existed, sweating in a kitchen and still becoming himself.
