New Delhi, Aug. 30 -- Before Anthony Bourdain became the chef, author and TV host who taught an audience to eat, travel and look at the world with curiosity, he was Tony, a 19-year-old who didn't quite know what to do with himself.

"I was-to be frank-a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking," Bourdain wrote of himself in Kitchen Confidential, his 2000 memoir. It is an unusually unsparing assessment, and very much the man we meet in director Matt Johnson's coming-of-age film about the young Bourdain.

Johnson and his co-writers Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe take their ideas and inspiration from early chapters of the bestselling Kitchen Confidential, pa...