What do a temple of modernist cuisine in Chicago, a 150-year-old country restaurant in Iowa, and a brand-new Mexican place struggling to survive in Tucson have in common? The answer—beyond the obvious common denominator, food—varies from nearly nil to more than you'd expect, depending on the angle of observation taken in the documentary Spinning Plates. And if the comparisons and contrasts sometimes feel forced as the film alternates among the three, it hardly matters: Spinning Plates is full of twists and turns, life and death, families and fires. Food may be the foundation, but these are profiles in determination, disaster, and devotion. You can't write stuff like this.

The restaurant-obsessed will guess that the tippy-top high-end place here is Alinea, and they'll already know the twist involving chef Grant Achatz. Anyone and everyone will find his take on his rarefied role in the world of food honest, funny, and a little freaky; he freely admits that it's "absurd," the lengths to which he and his staff go in preparing two-bite courses for Alinea's 25-course dinners. It's more absurd juxtaposed with the simple hard work of the almost unbearably charming Francisco and Gabby Martinez, the new Tucson restaurateurs whose foreclosed-upon house hangs in the balance. The crystalline, nonjudgmental cinematography assigns the same beauty and gravity to a smear of masa going across a corn husk for the Martinezes' tamales as it does to Alinea's food artists/scientists assembling dishes with tweezers and furrowed brows. When the film effortfully locates common ground between these two diametrically opposed, very American stories, it's hard for it to ring true. And do they—can they, should they—have the same value to you?

The third establishment in Spinning Plates is Breitbach's Country Dining, in Balltown, Iowa, a place that's wholeheartedly a part of its community in a way the Martinezes aspire to and Alinea definitively does not. The old-fashioned kindness that endures through this family's tribulations will hurt your heart—but then so, in different ways, will the perseverance of both Achatz and the Martinezes. Spinning Plates is less about food, more about life.