Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

My own "Tony" story and a lesson on asking for help. [READER]( [Food & Drink]( A publicist sent me an advanced digital screener for the new documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, which opens in theaters today. As part of the file’s anti-piracy protections, my name was superimposed over the entire film like a digital watermark. This was particularly jarring every time the main subject appeared onscreen in close-up with a ghostly caption seeming to identify him as “MIKE SULA.” In the two years since his suicide, any time I hear or read the name “Anthony Bourdain,” I feel an icy jolt in my chest that sinks to my stomach and takes me back to the morning I woke to the news that he hanged himself in an Alsace hotel room. Unlike seemingly every food writer and chef in the world, I don’t have a good, real-life “Tony” story, but did I sink into the couch for that entire day, unable to move, unable to comprehend what had happened. In the years since, it hasn’t made much more sense than it did then. I have friends that I normally respect that nevertheless think that Bourdain was full of shit, but I was a straight-up fanboy. I'm pretty sure my writing took a harder turn toward the snark after I read the 1998 New Yorker breakout story that became Kitchen Confidential two years later. I started writing exclusively about food not long after that. I saved up for a trip to Vietnam based on what he wrote in A Cook’s Tour. And any time I’ve ever traveled anywhere, my pre-trip research has started with what happened when he’d gone there before. I guess I do have a "Tony" story. Once I accepted a freelance project in which food writers in various cities wrote essays to accompany Molson beer ads that featured Bourdain as the celebrity endorser. I wrote about Chicago's foie gras ban, and some Manhattan ad executive told me to "Stop trying to sound like Tony." Just as he became the patron saint of line cooks everywhere, he also became the aspirational figure for legions of writers who dreamt of traveling the world, eating what’s good, and making deep emotional connections with strangers before jumping off to the next stop and doing it over again. A few of the first lines of the film feature Bourdain’s voiceover intoning, “There is no happy ending,” followed by his friend, painter and musician John Lurie: “He committed suicide, the fucking asshole.” That’s enough to tip you off that Roadrunner is not the feelgood movie of the summer. It’s not even remotely inspiring, like, say, the average episode of No Reservations. It builds to its climax with a succession of Bourdain’s best friends, colleagues, and family members dissolving into tears as they struggle to explain what happened to him in the troubled final year of his life. It’s a real downer. And it’s a film as complicated and flawed as its subject. As reported in [the New Yorker]( director Morgan Neville used Artificial Intelligence to recreate the sound of Bourdain’s voice repeating material he’d written, but never read aloud on record. The film also casts Italian actress Asia Argento as the final, all-consuming obsession that finally did Bourdain in, but Neville has admitted he never bothered to approach her for an interview. But the big picture does explain a lot. Not enough for closure, but enough to know that no matter how much you identified with Anthony Bourdain in life, what led to his death was very particular to his very singular life and circumstances; seemingly inevitable, and yet still so, so avoidable. Another takeaway: if you need help, ask for it. 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