Noah Kahan’s upcoming Netflix documentary, Noah Kahan: Out of Body, opens like a story about a musician adjusting to a life that suddenly got much bigger. After premiering at SXSW Monday night, though, the film quickly shows it has a different focus. Rather than staying on the obvious beats of a breakout, it follows Kahan into the parts of his life fame didn’t quiet.
At the Q&A after the premiere, Kahan said the film didn’t start out with that scope in mind.
“I think at first it was kind of just going to be a documentary about tour and Fenway and Stick Season and these wild things that were happening to me,” he said.
As filming continued, the project changed.
“When [director Nick Sweeney] came in, we started to talk a little bit more about how it felt and what it looked like,” Kahan said. “I knew that it was going to be something bigger.”
From there, Out of Body becomes a much more personal film. Kahan speaks with unusual candor about body dysmorphia and says in the documentary that he has lived with it for 15 years. He also addresses depression in a way that gives the film a different center than the standard artist-rise story.
During the post-screening conversation, Kahan said watching the finished documentary was difficult because it forced him to face things he had spent years compartmentalizing.
“They asked questions that I was really scared to ask myself for a long time,” Kahan said of the filmmakers. “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 said he also wanted the film to offer the kind of honesty he had once looked for himself.
“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.”
Family also becomes a major part of the film. Kahan talks about the lingering effects of divorce and the conversations families often avoid until years have passed. He said the documentary changed some of those dynamics offscreen, too.
“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 weren’t able to have before became commonplace.”
Kahan also shared that he hopes, above all, fans use the film as a catalyst to grow closer to their own families.
“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,” he said. “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.”
The documentary will stream on Netflix April 13.
