I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a full episode of one of Anthony Bourdain’s shows but there’s no denying that he is a household name. Even so I wouldn’t have watched this documentary if it weren’t for its sky-high ratings. The first half of this film is largely uninteresting, being about his rise to fame and success and meanders about without coming to a point. But the second half takes a darker turn into Bourdain’s problems with addiction and his depressive personality. As it ends as we all know with his suicide, it is undeniably much more engrossing even if it feels wrong to look so deeply into the private details of the man’s personal life.

When restaurant chef Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential becomes a bestseller, he achieves instant fame. Plans for a second book about his travelling around the world to sample different foods is expanded when producers suggest that the tour be filmed. The show too is a success and soon Bourdain is involved full-time in one show after another, culminating in the the long-running Parts Unknown series on CNN. All this as well as details of his personal life are covered in interviews with his producers, colleagues, friends and ex-wife Ottavia Busia. But the real strength of the film is their frank comments on the darker side of his personality: his tendency to obsess and be addicted to particular things or people, his life-long struggle with depression, and later how he seemed to hate appearing on the show and yet wouldn’t give it up. His friends and colleagues clearly attribute the immediate cause of his suicide to problems in his relationship with Asia Argento, especially after investing so much in her campaign against Harvey Weinstein. Given the trajectory of his life and his inner struggles, his friends understandably grieve for him but most of them don’t seem particularly surprised by the suicide.

Bourdain is arguably a forerunner of the travel and food influencers who are all over social media these days. Though he achieved fame rather late in his life, I note from his biography that he has always had a literary bent despite being a chef and had tried publishing fiction before finding success with Kitchen Confidential. He was an introvert and wasn’t a natural communicator but I suspect his philosophical musings and occasional literary turns of phrase helped make his show stand out. Recounting these successes isn’t really interesting and at times, the documentary feels like a memorial or tribute of interest mainly to his fans and the people who knew him. I did like that it reveals some of inherent absurdities of the television format. It’s one thing to walk by a street in Rome and casually offer some piercing commentary. But to do so again and again and each time expecting to be able to come up with some new nugget of wisdom inevitably cheapens the experience. How much authenticity can there be if every new scene or dish sampled much be met with expressions of delight and enthusiasm for someone who travels so much that he visibly tires of it?

Most of the documentary’s value probably lies in satisfying the public’s fascination about why such a prominent and successful media personality would commit suicide so suddenly. In that sense, it serves as another useful reminder of how real the danger of depression is. It’s not just about him feeling depressed and confessing how rare it is for him to feel happiness. It’s how he latches onto different things, his travel, his friends, his family, his lovers and so on to stave off the emptiness but they never seem to satisfy him for long. There is a salacious aspect in how personal the film gets and yet at the same time there isn’t quite enough information about whether his depression, which apparently all of friends and family members know about, was adequately treated. We do see a scene of him talking to a therapist but we have no idea what medications he was taking, if any. I suspect that this is a case of him being such a powerful and influential person that no one else in his life was in a position to insist that he receives proper medical treatment or take a break from his work after it became clear to everyone that it was harming him.

While the second half of the film certainly kept me engrossed, on the whole, I don’t think this is a very good documentary. As a writer, chef and television show host, he is just not that interesting a person to me as it’s not like he has any kind of singular vision or philosophy to share with the world. As a film about a celebrity who suffered from depression, it’s probably better to have a film entirely dedicated to that and bring in actual experts on the topic to offer insight. As it is, this seems mainly aimed at his fans who might be looking for some closure, but I’m not one of them.