Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021 | USA | 118 minutes | Morgan Neville)
We don’t need to speculate about what Anthony Bourdain would think about having a documentary made about his life. An eerie scene, culled from one of the final episodes of Parts Unknown, opens the film. Dining on an Indonesian beach, he directly addresses his own postmortem wishes in a seaside conversation with a friend: “Leave me in the jungle. I don’t want a party: ‘reported dead.’ … Throw me into a wood chipper and spray me into Harrods, you know, at the middle of the rush hour. That would be pretty epic.” With Roadrunner, kind-hearted documentarian Morgan Neville unsurprisingly does neither.
Instead, in the aftermath of his suicide at age 61, Neville virtually reunites many of Bourdain’s dearest friends and collaborators to contemplate his life and legacy while working through their still-raw grief on film. Whether the documentary’s subject would have approved of the project (probably not) is perhaps beside the point. This isn’t a film made for him; its participants (and audience) are those who adored him from near and afar.
For better and worse, Neville’s methods are primarily celebratory rather than critical. As with Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, his tear-jerking hit documentary about Fred Rogers, this retrospective on the career of Anthony Bourdain pulls from hundreds of hours from his television projects and public appearances as well behind-the-scenes footage and present-day interviews with his friends. With little interest in interrogation or overlaying a narrative, the film instead largely accepts its subject on his own terms, stitching together a story of a beloved friend and brilliant career cut short.
Roadrunner picks up in 1999 with Bourdain on the precipice of his self-described “very lucky” leap from Provincetown dishwasher to New York City line cook to chef to fuck-up (and writer of crime fiction) to author of a wildly-successful memoir. Here, we meet his old friend Joel Rose who shared some of Bourdain’s captivating e-mail missives from Japan with his wife, publisher Karen Rinaldi, who made him an unrefusable offer to turn them into a book. Archival home video footage captures him in the act of writing Kitchen Confidential, the book that would make him a household name, garner frequent talk show guest appearances, launch his career in television, send him on a near-continuous series of world travels, and bring an end to his first marriage.
It was on the heels of Kitchen Confidential’s success that Bourdain set out in search of the perfect meal, traveling the world while writing A Cook’s Tour. It was on this trip that he met longtime creative partners Lydia Tenaglia and Christopher Collins, who followed his uneasy first steps into new places captured them on film. The documentary captures the transition from initial awkwardness to finding a voice through fondness for cinematic references (Bourdain’s obsession with Apocalypse Now, in particular, is a frequent inspiration) and discovering that their subject was far better at experiencing than explaining. Even along this journey, which featured plenty of episodes of “eating weird stuff in far flung places” to satisfy network needs, the trio begins to establish a what would become hallmark throughline of bearing witness to the people and places ravaged by American wars. His frank personality, facility for communication, and constant spirit of adventure situated Bourdain as our foremost chronicler of travel and a supreme ambassador to the power of food, unfussy or otherwise, as a central component of cultural embrace.
Neville highlights transformative experiences during key episodes of his various television series — Beirut during wartime, a challenging shoot in the Congo, a trip with his brother to their childhood stomping grounds of Arcachon — to establish the genesis of his humility and evolution as a storyteller. Along the way, we meet many of the admiring and talented crew who followed Bourdain’s instantly-recognizable silhouette around the globe, learned to work with his distinct style, and whose talents shaped the visual language of his final masterpiece series Parts Unknown.
Bourdain’s personal life was also deeply shaped by his filmmaking, in that he met his second wife Ottavia Busia-Bourdain during a stop in Italy. Their marriage, decision to have a child, and his ensuing dive into the surprising pleasures of domesticity provide a window on life beyond the stage. Neville convenes friends like musicians Josh Homme, Iggy Pop, and Allison Mossheart; fellow chefs Dave Chang and Eric Ripert; and artist David Choe for insights on the rigors of travel, the pressures of the kitchen, and the near-impossibility of “normalcy” for someone like Bourdain. These friends also foreshadow the lurking darkness, ever-present in his recovering-addict personality, yet frequently expressed most publicly as a sort of wry self-deprecating humor.
As the documentary approaches the end of Bourdain’s life, it addresses his growing depression through his own iPhone videos, Instagram stories, and emails, resorting in a few places to controversially deepfaking his voice with an AI to narrate. It is in this last section that one feels Neville’s duty toward his subject wrestling control of the film. In a section covering Bourdain’s courtship with Asia Argento, her growing role in a tumultuous season of Parts Unknown, and his zealous embrace of the MeToo movement, one gets the sense of growing conflict and concern among his circle of friends. Their discomfort is palpable, but not rigorously interrogated (Argento, whose public affair ended their tumultuous relationship, does not appear in the film), perhaps out of a sense of protectiveness to these people, most of whom were talking about their friend for the first time after his death and who are leery of letting his final day overshadow his legacy. This sensitivity makes for a delicate balance for an empathetic filmmaker.
In a sense, the film plays less like a wake than a therapy session. Old footage of Bourdain on a Cape Cod beach contemplating his days as an “angry young man” are intercut with David Choe saying how much he’d hate being lionized. The artist, deeply familiar with the scars of addiction and still grieving his friend, ends the film with an act of public defacement. It’s the closest that the documentary gets to the kind of messiness that its subject may have preferred. But again, he’s not the audience. Although Neville keeps his hands a little too clean for this to be a truly great documentary, encapsulating such a complicated subject with grace is an admirable feat of filmmaking. I suspect that the generous exploration of his monumental life and compilation of insights from his friends is one that most of his biggest fans will both adore and find cathartic.
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain opens Thursday July 16 in theaters.