When the filmmaker Morgan Neville began making a documentary on Anthony Bourdain, the late chef and globe-trotting television host, one of the first things he did was comb through every song Bourdain had ever referenced. He came up with a playlist 18½ hours long and called it “Tony.”
Neville, the director of the Fred Rogers portrait “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and the Oscar-winning “20 Feet From Stardom,” was determined to approach Bourdain through a prism other than his death. Music was only a small part of it. But it was a start in making “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” a celebration of Bourdain’s life. Not a forensic inquiry. Not a eulogy.
This was the fall of 2019, when Neville began. Bourdain’s death, in June 2018 by suicide, was still fresh. For many, it is still. “Roadrunner” premiered over the weekend at the Tribeca Festival, days after the three-year anniversary of Bourdain’s death. Just the debut of the film’s trailer prompted an outpouring of emotion – and millions of views within days, a rarity for a documentary – showing how many are still grieving Bourdain’s loss.
“I’ve come to think of the film as an act of therapy for the public,” Neville said in an interview. “I think for people who only know Tony as someone they were a fan of, like me, there was just this giant question mark hanging over his life because of his death. How the (expletive) could Tony Bourdain kill himself? That is still something people are grappling with. ”
“Roadrunner,” which Focus Features will release in theaters July 16, goes about answering that question by filling in a fuller portrait of Bourdain. It gives new insight and context to Bourdain’s end by following the arc of his life – or, more specially, his second life. After years of working as a chef in New York, Bourdain’s book “Kitchen Confidential” catapulted him to fame in middle age. In “Parts Unknown” and other far-flung travel shows that feasted on not just indigenous foods but a wide spectrum of culture, history and shared passions, Bourdain became an unlikely, and unusually authentic, television icon.
