Chef Flynn

There’s nothing quite like a foodie movie to make one dream of abandoning easy dinner recipes plucked from the Internet (although most of us don’t follow up by becoming artists in the kitchen). Ten-year-old boy Flynn McGarry, a Studio City wunderkind who got tired of his busy, single mom’s limited repertoire of meals, practiced cooking skills in his bedroom before commandeering, in a big way, his home kitchen. The fascinating documentary Chef Flynn serves up a collage-like portrait of young McGarry’s life, with loads of old home video mixed in with filmmaker Cameron Yates’s contemporary footage. Viewers see McGarry grow from babyhood (mixing sugar and spices together in a pot with a wooden spoon), up through the repurposing of his family’s living room into a gourmet restaurant (with actual gourmands and food critics enjoying dazzling courses), and on to eventually creating pop-up restaurants in L.A. and New York City at age 14, coping with online trolls, and being recognized from the cover of the New York Times Magazine. The most compelling moments occur when McGarry tests his mettle while cooking in New York, becoming stressed and self-doubtful, shouting and cursing as hungry customers await dinners that take longer than expected (even with a full complement of cooks and wait staff on hand). The reality-TV-like drama is voyeuristically fun, but the emotional anchor of Chef Flynn lies in the increasingly challenging relationship between McGarry and his filmmaking mother, Meg, as she reluctantly abandons her work to become a de facto restaurant manager and, for teenaged Flynn, a parental distraction. Recommended. (T. Keogh)