Review: Roadrunner Is a Raw and Exalting Tribute to Anthony Bourdain

Morgan Neville’s documentary understands that Anthony Bourdain’s gifts and curses were cojoined.

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
Photo: Focus Features

Anthony Bourdain was adored for his irresistibly varied shades of masculinity, which suggested a new kind of cool. On the one hand, he was a traditional bad boy: a handsome man’s-man chef, a warrior of the New York kitchen scene who spoke plainly and often obscenely about any topic while drinking his companions under the table. Yet he was also a shy empath, a brilliant writer, a cinephile and obsessive reader, as well as a perceptive travel host who, on his various television shows, could explore other cultures without indulging either in superiority or in smug, condescending preachiness.

In public at least, Bourdain’s tough-guy persona and sensitivity seemed to balance themselves out, suggesting something like a version of the ultimate guy. It’s this best-of-all-worlds quality, rather than the fame and money, or even the seemingly best job in the world, that rendered his suicide in June 2018 so maddening and inscrutable. Such calamities show that balance is, perhaps more often than not, an illusion, cutting into our subliminal notions of security, especially the capitalist idea of success as balm for the psyche.

Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is a survey of Bourdain’s public professional life, beginning more or less with his ascension in the wake of the publication of the 2000 bestseller Kitchen Confidential, but it’s inescapably eaten up with Bourdain’s death. The documentary is nervier and friskier than one expects a tribute like this to be, as Neville keys into Bourdain’s oscillating manic states of euphoria and despair, revealing that his suicide wasn’t shocking but an inevitable end for an addictive personality who hopped from obsession to obsession in a search for a sense of stability and safety—for a state of “normalcy” that addicts often see as unattainable regardless of their level of success.

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For some, to be a sober addict—Bourdain smoke and drank but quit heroin cold turkey in the ’80s—is to feel as if you never belong. Roadrunner perceptively shows that Bourdain became addicted to that very irresolution, and retrospectively his wrestling is right there on the surface of his work, even in the titles of two of his TV shows: No Reservations and Parts Unknown. As in 20,000 Feet from Stardom and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Neville utilizes the public nature of his subject’s life, reconfiguring clips and found footage into a biodrama slipstream. Starting with his first show, A Chef’s Tour, Bourdain was filmed exhaustively, and a shrewd and empathetic Neville favors footage that amplifies Bourdain’s causticness and control freakiness and the sadness that arises from his unmeetable needs. It’s shocking to revisit oft-seen footage and realize how rarely Bourdain looks happy, as he physically embodies textbook depression, with weary eyes that suggest emotional guardrails.

Roadrunner’s theme is essentially voiced early in the documentary by a clip of Bourdain at the edge of stardom, when he was the chef at the New York eatery Brasserie Les Halles and waiting for a late delivery of fish. This is why chefs are drunks, he says, because they expect the rest of the world to operate like their kitchen. Bourdain’s roaming around the planet was essentially a search for extremity and order. Yet he also, until near the end of his life, was enough of an artist to know when to cede the spotlight to an evocative or poignant dinner guest. He could connect to someone on camera, playing the celebrity and everyman at once with peerless precision, in essence dramatizing his own quest for bonhomie.

It’s this impression of Bourdain as a time bomb existing in plain sight that allows Roadrunner to be more than a greatest-hits rundown of the man’s life. Much of the information here will be old hat to Bourdain junkies, only Neville imbues it with the man’s troubled soul, allowing him to speak for himself with the subtext of his demons amplified. Neville particularly unites Bourdain’s preoccupations into a daisy-chain of overcompensating manias. With his first wife, Nancy Putkoski, Bourdain developed his writing and public persona, and with his second, Ottavia Busia, who’s interviewed in the film, he quit smoking and immersed himself in jiu-jitsu, which he would talk to his friends about for hours, boring them to abstraction. And with his girlfriend, Asia Argento, he would become obsessed with, well, her—an infatuation that’s evident in the clips that Neville includes from Parts Unknown, as well as in the talk shows in which he became a devout Me Too activist in response to Argento’s allegations of rape against Harvey Weinstein. As contextualized here, Bourdain’s zeal is terrifying, suggesting a seismic loss of the control and balance that he spent his life attempting to cultivate.

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Neville works up a cloud of dread that’s laced with exaltation, as this is, after all, also the story of a relative late bloomer who turned his demons into art, into a celebration of curiosity and adventure. Roadrunner understands that Bourdain’s gifts and curses were cojoined. The man’s nomadic career was informed in part by his discomfort with ordinary domestic life, which cost him and his family for the sake of shows and books that embrace tolerance in a wonderfully flip, clipped, rock-star manner. Bourdain made humanism look cool, as his sickness, cynicism and alienation gave him the power to banish platitudes from his work, while also assuring that he would never quite feel he deserved to be among the people he indelibly documented.

Neville posthumously extends to Bourdain a welcoming embrace, without sanding off the rough edges. The friends and colleagues interviewed here, among them chefs David Chang and Eric Ripert, and musicians John Lurie, Josh Homme, and Alison Mosshart, don’t trade in the usual glib evasions because they’re hurt and angry. Besides his work, Bourdain left something behind that’s more typical of depressives and struggling addicts: scars.

Score: 
 Director: Morgan Neville  Distributor: Focus Features  Running Time: 118 min  Rating: R  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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