At SXSW, Noah Kahan debuted a beautiful and revealing documentary about his struggles with fame, depression and body dysmorphia.
“I recommend sandwiching it between a couple MrBeast videos to soften the blow,” he joked after the screening. “It’s pretty depressing. It’s definitely not like a party piece.”
That being said, the film — titled “Noah Kahan: Out of Body” and out on Netflix on April 13 — is surprisingly funny, with the Austin audience at the Paramount Theatre laughing out loud throughout the screening. Director Nick Sweeney captured the singer-songwriter from playing tiny venues before the pandemic to writing “Stick Season,” an ode to his home state of Vermont that made him so famous he headlined Fenway Park in 2024.
“Out of Body” sees Kahan opening up about his disordered eating and body dysmorphia, saying he has struggled with his body image for 15 years. He admitted after the screening that it was “really difficult” for him to watch the film.
“They asked questions that I was really scared to ask myself for a long time,” Kahan said of Sweeney and the producers. “It’s easy to shut these things away and to compartmentalize them. And when you have a documentary made about yourself, you have no choice but to confront those really secret fears.”
He hopes to destigmatize talking about mental health, and he started the nonprofit The Busyhead Project to make therapy more accessible.
“When I was a kid, I would look up ‘artists with antidepressants,’ ‘artists with depression,’ and I’d be so disappointed because I couldn’t find anybody that said, ‘Hey, I’m struggling with this too,'” Kahan said. “So when I would find an artist that was talking about what they were going through that I was going through at the same time, it felt like I just found religion. And my ultimate hope was that somebody watching this movie could feel like they have never heard somebody say that before, and they can start to confront that with themself.”
The film sees Kahan traveling between cities on tour, as well as his native state of Vermont and his current home in Nashville with his wife, Brenna. Before playing Fenway Park and Madison Square Garden, the artist gets vulnerable about his fears that his career might have already peaked. After the surprise smash success of “Stick Season,” where does Kahan go next? The film answers that question by leaving off on footage from the recording studio, with Kahan laying down vocals on the 2026 single “The Great Divide,” which earned him his first No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart.
And “Out of Body” pulls on heartstrings as it shows the Kahan family watching their own home videos and confronting family trauma. In one particularly devastating scene, Kahan sings “Forever” backstage for a teen girl undergoing leukemia treatment. Her name, Zuza Beine, appears in the credits under “In Loving Memory Of.”
Much of the documentary, too, focuses on Kahan’s family life and his relationship with his divorced parents and siblings.
“After we watched this documentary as a family, we all grew so much closer,” he said. “It brought us together, and that first week after watching it, every conversation that we were weren’t able to have before became commonplace.”
In the film, Kahan talks about having guilt for being “selfish” toward his parents, and he apologizes to them for airing their family’s “dirty laundry” in his song lyrics. The documentary forced him to have difficult conversations with his family that he otherwise might not have had.
“It’s really cathartic to see that maybe I’m not as bad as I think I am, and maybe I didn’t do as wrong as I thought I did. That was really important to go through,” Kahan said.
“I wish that everyone in this room could have a documentary made about their lives,” he added, causing the audience to laugh. “I really do. It’d be a very expensive exercise, but it just brought us together.”
He continued, “You never really question how you treat each other and what your family looks like and what the context of your life means. Getting a chance to see it like this is a miracle. It’s an amazing opportunity to grow closer to people that you love and that you want to understand more.”
If there’s one thing he hopes audiences take away from “Out of Body,” it’s this: “You might never have that conversation with your mom or dad. You might never get that chance to say sorry or I love you, or any iteration of those comments. … I hope that you guys have those hard conversations, because we don’t have a lot of time here. It’s really important that the people we love know how we feel.”
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