Why the facts of Anthony Bourdain's life were less relevant to his biopic makers than emotional truth

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Set us as preferred In the second film of the summer that smooths the rough edges of a complicated man, we meet the future chef and global TV star Anthony Bourdain at age 19, blustering through a comically pretentious fellowship proposal for the dour-faced members of a Vassar College faculty committee.At first, this young Bourdain is easy to imagine as a slightly older version of actor Dominic Sessa’s breakout role in “The Holdovers,” as if the earlier movie’s sullen and arrogant high school student was now a sullen and arrogant college student — without the emotional growth brought about by Paul Giamatti’s dysfunctional history teacher.

“What I’m trying to do,” Sessa’s overly confident Bourdain tells the professors, “is create a metaphorical conversation between George Orwell and Jack Kerouac, as if ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ was typed out on one long piece of paper.” He’s referencing the now-totemic scroll on which a Benzedrine-fueled Kerouac typed “On the Road” — the novel’s taped-together pages sold for $12.1 million at auction in March — as well as the Orwell book that the real Bourdain once called “a template and an inspiration” for his bestselling memoir and chef-culture tell-all “Kitchen Confidential.” Matt Johnson’s funny, biting biopic of the future star chef is stuffed with the teen wastrel’s blood and vomit.It still goes down like a smooth treat.Of course, the real Bourdain did not propose such a ludicrous project, which the movie professors pass on after he’d already boasted to his family and friends that he’d gotten the fellowship.Nor was Bourdain at this point in his life as romantically bumbling as the film portrays, chasing the more experienced Nancy (Emilia Jones from “CODA” and HBO’s “Task”) to Provincetown, where at the start of his ...