Noah Kahan: Out of Body on Netflix asks whether the music that heals an audience ever heals the man who made it

There is a theory, implied by decades of singer-songwriter mythology, that making honest work about pain is itself a form of resolution. You name the thing. You make it into a song. The song goes out into the world, reaches people who needed it, and in the transaction something is released. Noah Kahan built a career — and then a sudden global phenomenon — on that premise. Out of Body, directed by Nick Sweeney and now on Netflix, is a ninety-minute examination of what happens when the premise turns out to be more complicated than the songs suggested. It is the most quietly unsettling music documentary in recent memory, not because anything shocking happens in it, but because it keeps asking a question it refuses to answer.

The film opens after the extraordinary success of Kahan’s 2022 album Stick Season, which turned the specific melancholy of rural Vermont — staying behind while everyone leaves, watching a Target open where the main intersection used to be — into a global anthem for a generation that had spent two pandemic years being left behind in various ways. The resonance was real and enormous and largely unpredicted. Kahan, who was playing midsize theaters when the project began, found himself headlining Fenway Park. Out of Body starts at that apex and then stays close to what follows: a year of returning home, of confronting the family history that his songs had been standing in for, of trying to make new music while the old music was still circulating at scale, still being claimed by strangers, still arriving as notifications on his phone.

Sweeney, working with a small crew that included two of Kahan’s own high school classmates who became filmmakers, chose to build the film almost entirely from present-tense material. There is very little archival structure — no retrospective interviews, no industry figures speaking to camera, no the-morning-everything-changed mythology. What there is, instead, is a family watching themselves on home video together. It is a scene that sounds small and is devastating in practice: the past made present, uncomfortably, with the camera watching the watching. The editorial argument embedded in that choice — to strip away the architecture of historical significance and stay inside the ordinary — is that the story Kahan’s music has always been telling was never about becoming famous. It was about what a family carries and doesn’t say.

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What the film shows that his music never quite managed: Kahan speaking directly, without the protection of the creative process, about body dysmorphia and disordered eating — struggles carried for fifteen years. He apologizes to his parents for the songs he wrote about their divorce. He sits in kitchens and in cars and in backstage corridors, visibly uncertain, occasionally funny, often exhausted. Director Sweeney has said he waited repeatedly for Kahan to place limits on what could be filmed and found, every time, that no limits came. That access produced footage that operates at a genuinely different register from the controlled revelation of most artist documentaries. There is a scene backstage in which Kahan sings for a teenage girl undergoing leukemia treatment. Her name, Zuza Beine, appears later in the credits under “In Loving Memory Of.” The film does not comment on this. It lets it stand. That decision — to include the moment without processing it — is both the documentary’s most honest gesture and its most destabilizing one.

The industry layer of the film is visible in its near-total absence. No label. No management. No business infrastructure made visible. What appears in its place is Kahan checking social media after shows, monitoring audience reaction in real time, the external evaluation mechanism so thoroughly internalized that the apparatus itself barely needs to appear. This is a portrait of what the streaming era has produced: an artist for whom the feedback loop never closes, for whom the record cycle never ends, who lives inside continuous exposure without the structural relief of a defined season. His anxiety about the follow-up to Stick Season is not classic second-album fear. It is the confusion of someone trying to find new private material while the old private material is still being actively consumed by millions of people who feel, legitimately, that it belongs to them.

The cultural timing of Out of Body makes an argument the film itself never states. The documentary was shot in 2024, during the We’ll All Be Here Forever tour, and releases in April 2026 — the same month as Kahan’s new album, The Great Divide. The chapter that Stick Season opened is now formally closed. But what that gap reveals, in retrospect, is that the music that helped people navigate a collective disorientation was made by a person who was navigating a private one at the same time, and who never quite stopped. The world moved on. The songs remained in him. Out of Body is the document of what it cost to carry them through a year of stadiums and family dinners and difficult mornings in Vermont kitchens while the Vermont landscape turned through its four seasons outside the window, indifferent to all of it.

The legacy problem this documentary cannot resolve is structural. Kahan is twenty-nine. The arc is not finished. Sweeney has chosen to position the viewer not as judge of a completed career but as companion in an ongoing moment — which is both the film’s emotional strength and the source of its honest incompleteness. The documentary ends in the recording studio, Kahan tracking vocals on the song that would become his first number-one single. It is a forward-looking image. It implies renewal and continuation. But the film’s real final question is not whether he made a great album. It is whether the process of making Out of Body — of adding documentary exposure to the already heavy load of lyrical self-disclosure, of converting even the act of confronting the pain into new material — closed anything, or opened a more self-aware version of the same loop.

That is the question the music cannot fix. Kahan speaks in the film about hoping a viewer might find in it what he found as a teenager searching online for artists who admitted to struggling — the relief of recognition, the feeling of having found religion in someone else’s honesty. That hope is genuine and the film will deliver it to many people. But Out of Body, at its most honest, is not a film about helping other people. It is a film about a man trying to locate himself inside a life that his own work has made almost entirely public, and finding that the territory between what he has disclosed and what he has actually processed is larger than he expected. Whether making the film reduced that territory, or simply mapped it more precisely — that question is left open, as it should be, because it is not a question that footage can answer.

Noah Kahan: Out of Body is streaming on Netflix from April 13. His album The Great Divide is released on April 24.

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