A recurring quip on the BBC podcast “Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review” (aka “Wittertainment”) is that Jaws is “not about a shark.” Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain prompts a similar conclusion about its stated subject. Nominally about the late chef who first shot to fame with his 2000 “tell all” memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and the journey from behind those kitchen doors to the media star who ate noodles with President Barack Obama in Vietnam for an episode of CNN’s “Parts Unknown,” it is less a film about Bourdain than one about absence, artifice, and the limits of storytelling.

There is plenty of Bourdain in the film, much of the footage previously unseen because it predates his media persona: a young chef ordering vegetables on an old-school mobile device while sitting on the pavement outside Les Halles (the New York restaurant where he became...

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