TONY: The Distant Thunder of Anthony Bourdain

Composer Jay McCarrol takes us inside the restless mind of a culinary icon before he became one.

by Aurora Zboch

Published on August 28, 2026

A kitchen is a cacophony. In the new Anthony Bourdain biopic TONY, it’s a busy, messy, noisy, percussive place — enough without a gaggle of drug-fuelled dudes constantly ripping on each other. And for the young Bourdain, still years away from becoming the culinary icon we know, every fuck-up seems punctuated by the sound of shattering dishes.

Against all that chaos, composer Jay McCarrol goes in the opposite direction. His minimal yet thunderous, bass-heavy piano score gives voice to the anger Bourdain refuses to express outright. Between punching walls and smashing bottles, it leaves the audience sitting in the frustration he’s constantly trying to outrun.

“We know that the storm of Anthony Bourdain is coming,” McCarrol says. “But this is just the beginning of him realizing he’s going to set sail in his life. It’s the first casting-off part.”

We first hear that theme in Bourdain’s childhood bedroom. It follows him out into the world, resurfacing when he burns his hand and again through failures both minuscule and catastrophic.

“All of a sudden he’s reduced to the little boy that he was, and he’s angry — he’s punching the wall again. And there’s some sort of longing that he’s feeling, he does just feel the angst and the pull of a whole life that’s ahead of him, but he doesn’t have it together yet,” McCarrol says.

McCarrol is no stranger to playing with the line between music and film. Along with frequent collaborator and director Matt Johnson, he’s one of the masterminds behind Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and BlackBerry.

The music underscores Tony’s coolness, despite the 19-year-old kid spending much of his time flopping and floundering. “The role that the score has is to get into his head where nobody else can hear that part. That’s the stuff that nobody else sees,” McCarrol says in a video call with RANGE.

McCarrol remains inspired by the force of nature that Bourdain became. “With anyone who has this sort of laid-back, cool factor to them, it’s infectious. It slows your tempo down, and it brings your pitch down a bit. And that’s what I was feeling myself instantly doing when I was thinking about the score, as I just felt the pace go down a little bit and the pitch where I was envisioning the music to sit. I wanted to find that inner calm and that inner cool being there — no matter how angry and adolescent I was also trying to represent.”

TONY is a snapshot of the summer of 1975, when Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) follows his crush Nancy (Emilie Jones) to Provincetown, Massachusetts, under the pretense of a literary scholarship, claiming he’s only working in a kitchen for inspiration. (Spoiler: he isn’t.)

McCarrol spent months behind his keyboard, watching Bourdain’s documentaries on mute and tapping away. “I wanted to do it just to the left where there is just the lower, masculine, stoic, solemn and dignified sound of the piano. I wanted to choose my notes carefully yet played them with a little bit of uncertainty.”

The result is a slower, darker, Vince Guaraldi-esque score that is restrained but cool and collected.

TONY marked the first time Johnson tackled the actual production largely without his usual crew, save for producer Matt Miller. “With the trusted gang, we have learned what our standards are and what boxes to check,” McCarrol says.

“[Johnson] got to get the experience of going to work in an American machine which he reported back was very difficult. It was a lesson and he’s right for doing it because he’s getting that rite of passage to learn a machine outside of his own,” he says.

“We all colour outside the lines of our department and that comes from just years and years of grinding out stories together and falling and picking ourselves back up. The fact that we make mistakes together means that we recover together and we learn the same tricks.”

McCarrol reflects: “For a lot of people out there, he’s being a person that you want to be, especially if you’re living vicariously through his travels and you’re watching him go about the world in a way that you would ideally want to go about it yourself — with that amount of curiosity and that amount of cool factor.

“You could be in Thailand sitting on a mini stool, eating noodles at this place that is buzzing with the locals and he’s asking them about the history and how the government changed. You go through any moment like that with him and it’s the actual content of what is happening that’s so cool, but also just the way he’s carrying himself is so restrained. There’s something where you watch it and you go, I want to remember to be more like that.”

While TONY is unlike any of Bourdain’s documentaries, it shows us the frustratingly funny human before he becomes the international man of mystery. It exposes the celebrity chef’s soft underbelly, with McCarrol’s score acting as a north star toward the culinary escapades ahead — the distant thunder of the Bourdain we already know is coming.