Screenings of the new documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” start Thursday at the Providence Place Cinema. Directed by Morgan Neville, Slate calls the movie “a brilliant, sometimes troubling documentary about at brilliant, sometimes troubling man.”
Roadrunner intercuts clips of interviews with its subject and those who were close to him with behind-the-scenes footage from his shows and snippets from the movies and music he loved. Bourdain was a lifelong cinephile, and the film’s stream-of-consciousness-style editing often folds shots from his favorite films into scenes from his travels and his personal life . . . The result is not a dirgelike hagiography but a swift-moving and curiously sprightly movie that captures Bourdain’s vitality, his biting humor, his weapons-grade charisma, and his seemingly limitless hunger for new experiences.
The movie does not shy away from the less cheerful corners of his life: The filming of his shows sometimes took Bourdain to war-torn and earthquake-ravaged locations, with considerable risk to him and his crew. And then there’s Italian actress and director Asia Argento . . .
Rated-R. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.
[Additional note: Filmmaker Neville now admits he used AI to recreate Bourdain’s voice. (The Daily Beast). Not a dealbreaker, but definitely not cool. What was he thinking?]
7pm and 10:15pm, Thursday, July 15, Prov Place Cinema, the Mall (directions)