'Roadrunner' shows us Anthony Bourdain as he really was

[reader]

From National Public Radio

Anthony Bourdain, in Roadrunner, the new documentary about his life.

CNN/Focus Features

Anthony Bourdain was in his 40s when he got famous. A lot of people don't realize that. He'd lived a cook's life — hot, sweaty, messy, sometimes ugly — and wrote a book about it. He was still on the line when that book, Kitchen Confidential, hit the bestseller list. He found out about it by phone. He stepped away from his post, the rush, his knives and pans, to take the call, laugh, splash water on his face. There was a camera there to capture it, and the footage ended up in Roadrunner, the new documentary by Oscar winner Morgan Neville, about Bourdain's life, fame, stardom and death.

It covers 20 years, this film. More or less. It largely ignores early Bourdain, young Bourdain, pre-fame Bourdain, focusing instead on those years when the entire world knew his name. It isn't about the rise so much as the apex — stretched out across almost two decades. Here's this guy, it says. He's dead now, but you probably knew him. Or thought you did. Or believed you did. This is who he really was.

I thought I knew him a little. I was wrong. I read the books, watched the shows, saw him speak, same as you. I met him, talked with him, spent a night on the loading dock behind a restaurant in New Mexico drinking beers and passing a bowl with him and the rest of the kitchen crew after a book signing, caught a ride home with his driver while he fell asleep in the back seat, but there are a thousand people out there who can likely claim the same. The man shook a lot of hands in his time. He bent a lot of elbows. He talked and talked and talked. One of the most remarkable things about him (and this I know is true) is that none of it was an act. The person he was on your TV? That was the person he was when he went home at night (or, more likely, back to his hotel). He was curious, funny, angry, goofy and weird. He'd read a lot of books and seen a lot of movies, and all of them lived forever in his head.

Roadrunner gathers the people who knew him best — most of them, anyway (there are a couple of very notable exceptions, like Bourdain's last girlfriend, Asia Argento, and his first wife, Nancy Putkoski). Friends, partners, chefs, members of his team, his second wife, his brother. They're all there to tell their stories, to explain him — and then admit that they never could. To laud him and say how much they loved him, and then dissolve into fury at his end.

Bourdain was honest and that anger is honest, and the film doesn't look away from it. It doesn't look away from much of anything. It honors its subject by presenting him as flawed when he was flawed, exhausted when he was exhausted, cruel when he was cruel, and like any of us, he was those things sometimes. It's just that he lived his life on television.

Continues at

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/1016533992/anthony-bourdain-roadrunner-documentary-review

Editors' note: This review was written and posted before the revelations about the Roadrunner documentary's use of artificial intelligence to reconstruct Anthony Bourdain's voice. To read more — and see reactions from critics including Jason Sheehan — click here.

[Lonnie]

5 hours ago, reader said:

Bourdain, in Roadrunner, the new documentary about his life

Reading on they don't seem to go into the cause of his death...I believe it was by erotic asphyxiation.

[JKane]

I had really started to get into Bordain's new show on CNN and when he died I just couldn't watch anymore.  Still have the last couple episodes on my DVR.  

I saw this movie, and liked it.  It's a good portrait of an addictive/obsessive personality.  Not all of the addictions were bad, but the last one (Asia Argento) may've been the one that did him in, or not.  The movie definitely lets you blame her if you want, but also shows that Bourdain was deeply flawed and may've just taken that relationship 10X more seriously than she did.  

It was great to hear his voice (or whatever they did) and see most of the memorable friends who'd been on adventures with him again.  It was sad but not morose or depressing.  Most people in it blame him even directly calling him an asshole for doing it.  No, they don't go any more specific than it was a hanging that happened to be during turbulence with Argento.