While it may seem a little early in what will likely be a long career to get a high-profile documentary about your personal and professional crises, “Noah Kahan: Out of Body” overcomes this criticism by being remarkably vulnerable and focused. It’s not a typical hagiographic music doc in that it actually tears down as much as it elevates, revealing the insecurities, uncertainties, and even body dysmorphia of its subject. It’s an effective study of an artist at a crossroads, wondering not only which direction to go but if he’s peaked in his twenties.
Noah Kahan found music at a young age as he grew up in the small town of Strafford, Vermont, a place that even the locals in this film describe as lonely. Let’s just say one of the only interesting recent developments cited by one of the subjects is “a new Dunkin’.” Kahan made some original music in his teenage years, but what really changed everything was a timely blend of a pandemic and the explosion of TikTok.
During the pandemic, Kahan was stuck in his childhood home, and the mix of emotions about that led to the writing of Stick Season, an album that started its wild ascendancy on TikTok, where Kahan would upload snippets of the songs he was writing. I can remember stumbling onto that creative process as it was happening in late 2020, and marveling not only at Kahan’s excellent songwriting but the transparency of the process. He’s become a huge star due his musical abilities, but also due to the access he gave fans, who felt like they knew him from the minute they started to listen to his tunes. Not only was he writing vulnerable, emotional work about his emotional turmoil, he was letting us into his personal life as he turned it into art.
Stick Season would be released in 2022, and it became one of the biggest albums of its era, going four times platinum in the U.S., and doing similar numbers around the world. Kahan went from writing “Homesick” in his living room to playing sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and Fenway Park. “Out of Body” doesn’t merely celebrate the wild success of its subject—that would have been the easy, hagiographic thing to do: a “victory lap” approach that we so often see in music docs. Director Nick Sweeney and Kahan are smart enough not to do that, choosing instead to ask interesting questions that generally circle around “How do you approach the plate again when you hit a grand slam the first time?”
One interesting aspect to consider is Kahan’s concern that success will ruin him. How does one go from writing their breakthrough while stuck living with their mom during a pandemic to writing a follow-up with all the millions of dollars and fans he’s now earned? How could those two people possibly write similar works? Kahan is open about the restlessness that defines a lot of his work, a sense that’s he’s not happy in smalltown Vermont but only wants to return to it when he’s away from the community that knows him best.
He’s also impressively open about body dysmorphia—he’s somehow convinced he’s hideous and obese—and even severe depression. And he’s willing to talk about the emotional conflict about the way he uses his parents in his work, including the trauma caused by an accident his father suffered and a divorce he calls relatively amicable. He’s refreshingly close to his siblings and parents, and that vulnerability feeds into his art.
Admittedly, “Noah Kahan: Out of Body” will play better to fans of the subject’s music, but it works as well as it does because it refuses to just be fan service, choosing instead to really capture the complexity of how fame doesn’t alleviate things like anxiety, sometimes even feeding that internal beast. Kahan is wickedly smart, and he knows that things like fame don’t always last. He may not think he has it all together, but no one does, and one walks away from “Out of Body” with a sense that he’s more aware of what matters to him and his music than most people who were struck by sudden fame. No one knows what’s next for Kahan—he has a new album and upcoming tour—but I would hope that watching “Out of Body” would give its subject the sense that he’s ready for any of it.
Now on Netflix.
