Documentary Review: Roadrunner Film About Anthony Bourdain

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021) 

Directed by Morgan Neville 

Written by Documentary 

Starring Anthony Bourdain, Asia Argento 

Release Date July 16th, 2021 

Published June 17th, 2023 

Late in the new documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, a friend recalls asking Bourdain how he managed to quit his heroin addiction cold turkey. This was a foreign concept to Bourdain’s friend, a fellow addict, who could not begin to imagine that level of willpower. Bourdain offered no real answer, just that he’d done it. It quickly dawned on Bourdain’s friend that Bourdain may have beaten heroin but he hadn’t beaten addiction. 

Instead of heroin, Anthony Bourdain’s addiction jumped to other sources of pleasure or pain or experience, unattainable highs that could never be sustained in the same fashion that addiction to any drug either ends in death or simply losing the ability to get high all together. To me, this is a fascinating and thoughtful insight. Director Morgan Nevillve had a similar fascination with what Bourdain’s friend mentioned, how his addiction jumped from heroin to other types of obsession. 

In the immediate aftermath of Bourdain’s friend relating this story we join Bourdain learning Jiu Jitsu. Bourdain was obsessed with Jiu Jitsu for a time, an all consuming obsession, addiction, that drove the people around him crazy. Another of Bourdain’s friends, a member of the crew of his television series, recalled being irritated by Bourdain droning on endlessly about the benefits of Jiu Jitsu, he was relentless in talking about things he was passionate about. 

Bourdain applied this passionate obsessive quality to people as well, his wives, and his girlfriends. In a disturbing example of Bourdain’s obsession with and his addiction to very specific things, the movie recalls a time when Bourdain was speaking of his then girlfriend, actress Asia Argento, and going on and on about what he’d determined to be, her remarkable ability to parallel park. There is a look on Bourdain’s face as he’s discussing Argento’s ability to park a car in Italy that approaches madness, his eyes are wide, his gestures are broad and Argento appears deeply uncomfortable. 

It could be argued that director Morgan Neville frames this scene to underline the effect but regardless, I couldn’t help but feel the implied discomfort and Bourdain’s mad obsessive zeal. The documentary frames Bourdain’s entire relationship with Argento, which came in the last years of his life, as an addiction. Bourdain was deeply lonely after the end of his second marriage and is seen to wonder if he is someone who can be loved. 

In 1999 Anthony Bourdain, then already into middle age and seeing his life as one of working as a chef until they dragged his corpse from the kitchen, began writing a series of emails to a friend. This friend happened to be married to a publisher and after urging his wife to read Anthony’s breathlessly intelligent, urgent, and provocative words in these emails, the wife was sold, she needed to publish Anthony Bourdain. 

That is the story that led to Bourdain’s national breakthrough, the bestselling book, Kitchen Confidential which turned Bourdain into the bad boy of celebrity chefs. The book was an immediate smash success story which almost spawned a movie adaptation starring Brad Pitt and did spawn a brief and uninspired television series starring Bradley Cooper. Fame didn’t come easy to Bourdain but once he embraced it, his life was changed forever. 

The success of Kitchen Confidential led to Bourdain’s own series on The Food Network called A Cook’s Tour. The team behind Bourdain’s television series tell a terrific story about that show and how Anthony Bourdain was not the bon vivant personality that he would come to be known as, not right away. In fact, on the first trip for the show, Bourdain was listless and withdrawn, he refused to play the part of host and it appeared that the show was doomed. 

It wasn’t until the crew arrived in Vietnam when things began to click. Bourdain loved Vietnam, it also helped that his friend and former restaurant boss joined him and perhaps brought out a friendlier and more excitable version of Bourdain. From there it was off to the races on a career that would touch the lives of millions of fans and inspire wandering souls to discover their own inner traveler. 

From the outside, Anthony Bourdain had everything. His job was to go to cool places, have adventures, and eat food. His travels were exotic and beautiful and also provocative. Through his travels, the bad boy chef transformed into a deeply empathetic soul eager to tell the stories of the people behind the culture and food he was experiencing. This proved to be exhilarating television and in many ways, an exhilarating life but the strain on Bourdain comes clear as Roadrunner unfolds. The heart wrenching stories Bourdain sometimes told weighed on him more than his cool exterior let on.  

In 2018 Anthony Bourdain shocked the world by taking his own life in the midst of a shoot for his travel series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. His death was a stark reminder that while you think you know a celebrity or you assume that someone on television has a life that is a dream come true, you really don’t know them. This aspect of not knowing Bourdain but wanting to, drive so much of Roadrunner. 

Some have claimed that the troubled end to Bourdain's relationship with Asia Argento led him to take his life. Many read Roadrunner: A Film Abouut Anthony Bourdain as making that case, that Argento holds a responsibility in Bourdain's death. I don't see the movie quite that way. I feel that director Morgan Neville lays out the case that Bourdain's various addictions are what drove him toward a tragic end. Having chased a particular kind of high for his entire life, he finally reached a place where that high was no longer attainable. 

I believe, based on what Neville shows us in Roadrunner, that Bourdain was 'addicted' to his relationship with Argento in a deeply unhealthy fashion. That parallel parking story may be cringe-inducing in many ways, but I believe it is the thesis statement on Bourdain's obsessive personality, his addiction to Argento being the latest thing that had driven his lust for life. When that 'supply,' if you will indulge that as a metaphor for a human being, is cutoff, Bourdain simply felt he could not go on. That's not Asia Argento's fault. This type of obsession with another person is not healthy and it was perhaps better for Argento herself, regardless of whoever she might be as a person, I don't know her, to get out of that relationship. 

If you've never been the subject of another person's obsession, you don't know how strange and suffocating that can be. If you are the subject of someone else's obsession, you need to get out of it. It's not something that can be sustained or repaired. We happen to have some visual evidence of Bourdain's obsession with Argento and it's strange and haunting. It starts out humorous and slowly morphs into something pitiable and deeply uncomfortable. Anthony Bourdain's obsessions are what led to his death. His desire to be obsessed with something to distract him from unspoken anguish he felt and did not process or seek help for, are why we no longer have his brilliant mind in the world. 

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is brilliant, beautiful and tragic. It's incredibly difficult to watch but it's also engrossing and enlightening. It's a story that aches to be told. That it exists is a warning to anyone that an unexamined emotional pain is as dangerous and deadly as an unexamined and untreated open wound. Anthony Bourdain was bleeding emotionally and was unfortunately unwilling or unable to seek treatment for it. Roadrunner then is a cautionary tale about such deep emotional wounds. 

Documentary Review: Won't You Be My Neighbor

Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018)

Directed by Morgan Neville

Written by Documentary

Starring Mr. Rogers 

Release Date June 8th, 2018

Published June 8th, 2018

What is missing from the world in this day and age? Kindness. Kindness appears to be missing in this day and age. While everyone is yelling at each other and becoming tribal via social media, kindness is becoming more and more rare. Kindness exemplifies the work of Fred Rogers, the remarkable host of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. The life and work of Fred Rogers is now being celebrated in a new documentary called “Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?).”

In the 1951, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Fred Rogers was on his way to become a Presbytarian Minister when he first saw a television. The remarkable invention inspired him with its seemingly endless possibilities. Mr. Rogers would become a Minister eventually as well as a music scholar with a degree in music composition from Rollins College in Florida before settling into the world of television at WQED in Pittsburgh.

Rogers determination from the beginning was to work in children’s television and by 1963, the seeds of what would become Mr. Rogers Neighborhood were sewn. You likely know about Mr. Rogers and his sweaters and his songs and puppets but did you know he studied child development with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh alongside? That’s just one of the fascinating notes that make Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?) so unique and interesting.

"Won’t You be My Neighbor(?)" was directed by Morgan Neville, a documentarian who specializes in music documentaries. His “20 Feet from Stardom” won the Academy Award for Best Documentary feature at the 2013 Academy Awards. Neville is a smart, thoughtful and curious director who comes at the material of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?)” with an eye toward a conventional documentary narrative, a linear, life story, approach.

However, the unusual part of the “Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?)” is in the weight Neville gives not just to telling Mr. Rogers’ life story but explaining the impact he had on the lives of his viewers. Rogers was a quiet revolutionary, a Republican who fought for the funding of PBS in front of Congress and won. In 1968, in the wake of the death of Robert F. Kennedy, Rogers engaged his child audience in a conversation about death.

That same year, as controversy raged over civil rights and black people were being kicked out of public pools, Rogers enlisted his friend, Francois Clemmons as Officer Clemmons in the Neighborhood, to share a soak in his pool. The conversation had nothing to do with race or the raging controversies, it was just pleasant small talk about the weather but the visual of two people, black and white, sharing a kindly conversation, said what the conversation did not.

Clemmons is among the very emotional interviews that are featured in “Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?), alongside Rogers’ sons and his wife, Joanne. Naturally, everyone has lovely things to say about Rogers but the stories aren’t saccharine hagiography, but rather an earnest, emotional, fond remembrance. The film humanizes Rogers, especially near the end of the film when we get a glimpse of Rogers’ own insecurities, the kinds of things he helped children get passed.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?)” is a remarkable documentary without being showy or over-dramatic. Like its subject, the documentary is quietly revolutionary, playing to our emotional attachment to Mr. Rogers while genuinely educating us about this remarkable man and his impact on the world. For me, his kindness is a model. Rogers’ kindness is a superpower better than most superhero powers. Kindness is at the heart of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor(?) and that kindness, remembering that kind of kindness, makes this the best documentary of 2018 thus far.