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Viewer advice: Contains suicide themes
An intimate portrait of the life and death of beloved globe-trotting television presenter Anthony Bourdain from the Oscar-winning director of 20 Feet from Stardom.
Anthony Bourdain burst onto the American cultural landscape with the publication of his memoir, Kitchen Confidential, in 2000, and stayed there until his abrupt death by suicide in 2018. Across several successful television series, he journeyed, explored and ate his way around the world; his curiosity and compassion revolutionised popular conceptions of both travel and food. Bourdain was that rare figure: a celebrity audiences felt they really knew. But the qualities the public loved most about him – honesty, commitment, insatiable appetites – took their toll.
Through insightful interviews with many of the people who knew “Tony” best, including chefs David Chang and Éric Ripert, musicians Iggy Pop and Josh Homme, and crew members from the shows Parts Unknown and No Reservations, director Morgan Neville tracks Bourdain’s story from chef to household name. Bourdain travelled for nearly 20 years, sometimes for 250 days a year, and cameras were with him all the time; Roadrunner makes use of this depth of footage to celebrate the evolution – and ultimate tragedy – of this accomplished, complicated man.
“A raw, unmissable doc … Roadrunner registers as more than a requiem or a postscript. It feels like an essential document, created in the radical no-reservations spirit in which [Bourdain] lived.” – Entertainment Weekly
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