Back in 2021, Noah Kahan was sitting in a automobile along with his supervisor once they began batting across the thought of making a documentary on life as a touring artist. “I had never seen what tour really looks like [in a movie], except for promotional documentaries with screaming crowds and partying,” says Kahan, 29. “And it’s just such a more boring life than that — the travel, and the little things behind the scenes.”
“Stick Season,” the track that might make Kahan a family identify, was a 12 months away from launch once they had that dialog, and he was nonetheless a reasonably profitable singer-songwriter from New England, performing to a few thousand followers or so every night time at midsize theaters. “That’s what I thought was going to be my whole career, which I was so fine with,” he says. “In my mind, these were my prime years of touring. I was like, ‘I don’t know how long it’s going to last. We should start to capture this.’”
You can see what occurred subsequent in Noah Kahan: Out of Body, a remarkably revealing new movie coming to Netflix on April 13. Directed by Australian filmmaker Nick Sweeney (AKA Jane Roe), the 94-minute documentary follows Kahan carefully as he turns into a stadium-level famous person, and it doesn’t flinch from displaying the challenges that went alongside along with his astonishing rise. We see him working by his complicated relationships along with his dad and mom and siblings; fighting emotions of physique dysmorphia and imposter syndrome; and dealing with the stress of writing and recording his subsequent album, The Great Divide (out April 24). The week of the movie’s premiere at this 12 months’s SXSW pageant, Kahan and Sweeney sat down with Rolling Stone in Austin, Texas, to speak about all of it.
Noah Kahan (heart) and Nick Sweeney (proper) communicate onstage on the premiere of Noah Kahan: Out of Body at SXSW 2026.
Cris DeWitt/SXSW Conference & Festivals
Though Kahan is thought for his ability in transmuting robust emotional topics into anthemic verses and hooks, he discovered that making this movie demanded a distinct diploma of honesty.
“It’s harder,” he says. “[Writing songs,] you always have the shield of the creative process, or your own interpretation of the story you’ve made, to hide behind. And what you see is what you get in the documentary. It’s incredibly therapeutic to watch, but also really difficult to watch, because you have to revisit pain.”
He factors to at least one strikingly susceptible scene the place he’s backstage with wife-to-be Brenna Nolan earlier than headlining a pageant. “And I’m just in misery about music and about creativity … One thing that I’ve thought about a lot as I’ve watched the documentary is how consumed I was by the fears I had. I could see the tunnel vision.”
Sweeney was already a fan of Kahan’s lyrical method when he turned concerned within the movie undertaking across the finish of 2023. He quotes a line from Kahan’s 2022 track “New Perspective”: “The intersection got a Target/And they’re calling it downtown.” “That line always resonated with me,” Sweeney says. “It’s very detailed, the things he sings about. It’s like an establishing shot in a film, a musical form of that.”
As filming went on, he was shocked by how few restrictions Kahan placed on what the cameras might present. “I was like, ‘Is this guy really going to let me do that?’” Sweeney recollects. “And nothing was off limits. Like, absolutely nothing. I was always waiting for him to push back and be like, ‘Yeah, let’s not do that.’ And he never did.”
Working with a small crew that included two of Kahan’s highschool classmates who are actually filmmakers, Sweeney captured candid, unmediated footage of the Kahan household discussing the songs he’s written about his dad and mom’ divorce and different delicate subjects. “There’s discomfort, naturally,” Kahan admits. “It’s weird to have a documentary crew in your house. I would have been concerned if they were like, ‘Hell yeah, let’s do it.”
His fraught relationship along with his father ended up yielding many of the movie’s most compelling scenes. “I’ve broached it in my songwriting before, but the conversations with my dad and about my dad were revelatory for me,” Kahan says. “It’s so much easier to tuck away — you know, I see my dad and I’ll be frustrated by our interaction, and then I’ll go away on tour. But I knew that the reflections I was having with my dad were going to be seen by other people, and seen by my dad. That was really hard.”
He provides: “In those moments you’re like, ‘Is this worth it? Is it worth it for me to have this uncomfortable day with my mom or my dad be filmed?’” Ultimately, he says, “You have to just trust that the process is going to heal you in some way that makes that discomfort worth it.”
In one notably shifting scene, Kahan and his father carry out Cat Stevens’ 1970 basic “Father and Son” collectively at house on acoustic guitars, bringing the track’s themes of intergenerational battle and underlying like to the fore. “Oh, my God, I cried while I was filming,” Sweeney says. “There’s all this stuff that’s been building throughout the whole thing. And then they just play this song. It was really powerful… There’s a moment where it goes out of focus because I’m wiping tears.”
“Nick was so moved by it,” Kahan provides with a smile. “And my dad and I were like, ‘All right, let’s go get some lunch.’”
Kahan watches the movie at its premiere.
Aaron Rogosin/SXSW Conference & Festivals
More severely, he says, these on-camera conversations along with his household did some vital emotional work. “Even though those problems still exist and nothing’s ever really solved in your family — there’s always going to be new things — I feel like it gave me closure on some hard things. And it allowed me the freedom to write about these things.”
After filming wrapped about one 12 months in the past, within the spring of 2025, Sweeney undertook the duty of enhancing down all of the footage they’d gathered, which additionally included tons of beautiful nature pictures and interviews with on a regular basis individuals from the small-town Vermont area the place Kahan grew up. In the tip, they whittled these elements right down to “only the truly essential stuff,” Sweeney says. “I could make a whole ‘nother film, literally, like a slow cinema meditation.”
“I wish you would!” Kahan says. “That’d be cool.”
With his new album out this month, Kahan is trying ahead to shifting on from the chapter that this movie represents. “I’m really excited to experience what’s next for me — maybe without a documentary crew this time,” he says. “Doing something that’s already emotionally exhausting, playing a show, then having difficult conversations the next day with your family, it is hard. But I think my family is better for it. I feel like I’m a better person for it. I’m more in touch with myself. I’ve never had a better relationship with my family than I do right now.”
