In 2000, celebrity chefs were mostly clean-cut boys next door (Alton Brown, Bobby Flay, a baby-faced Jamie Oliver) or QVC-photogenic opportunists (Emeril Lagasse, Wolfgang Puck). Instead, the movie begins with Bourdain in his early 40s, right around the time he published his scorching exposé of the restaurant industry, Kitchen Confidential. It vividly and emotively captures Bourdain’s late-period melancholy and bitterness without fully connecting the dots to his history of addiction, his hypermasculine public persona, and his lifelong quest for transient thrills.
For the next two hours, Roadrunner seems to dodge all the parts of its subject’s life that might offer concrete answers to Neville’s question. “I want to make a film about why he was who he was,” Neville tells the artist John Lurie at the beginning of the movie. These are all odd, extravagant choices, and yet what confounded me most was what the movie left out. Since Roadrunner’s release, critics and viewers have debated some of the queasier ethical decisions Neville made: employing an artificial intelligence to create deepfake recordings of Bourdain’s voice, commissioning that saintly mural of his face for Choe to deface, framing the actor Asia Argento as the Yoko-esque agent of Bourdain’s downfall without so much as calling her for comment. “Going out in a blaze of glory was so fucking lame,” he says. “What the hell is everyone supposed to do?” The artist David Choe weeps on camera, and then spray-paints over a mural of Bourdain, as if to challenge the hagiographic portraits of the Parts Unknown host that proliferated after his death. “I don’t think he was cruel, and there’s such a cruelty to that ,” the musician Alison Mosshart says. Morgan Neville’s new documentary about the chef and TV star runs through two decades of Bourdain’s life onscreen before concluding with present-day scenes of his friends still struggling to parse his death by suicide in 2018, at the age of 61. Regardless of whether you loved Anthony Bourdain-and the striking thing is that so many people who had even a spotty acquaintance with him or his work felt like they did-the end of Roadrunner is devastating to watch.
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