What happens when you go from writing songs in your mom's house during a pandemic to selling out Fenway Park? In this movie recap, we dive into the Netflix original documentary "Noah Kahan: Out of Body" directed by Nick Sweeney.
We break down Noah’s meteoric rise following the success of his four-times-platinum album Stick Season, his ongoing battles with severe anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia, and his complicated relationship with his hometown of Strafford, Vermont. We also explore his deep family dynamics, his father's life-altering accident, and how he is preparing for his upcoming fourth studio album, The Great Divide.
If you love raw, honest music documentaries that strip away the celebrity gloss, this one is a must-watch. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more music and movie recaps!
#NoahKahan #OutOfBody #MovieRecap #NetflixDocumentary #StickSeason #MusicDoc
We break down Noah’s meteoric rise following the success of his four-times-platinum album Stick Season, his ongoing battles with severe anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia, and his complicated relationship with his hometown of Strafford, Vermont. We also explore his deep family dynamics, his father's life-altering accident, and how he is preparing for his upcoming fourth studio album, The Great Divide.
If you love raw, honest music documentaries that strip away the celebrity gloss, this one is a must-watch. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more music and movie recaps!
#NoahKahan #OutOfBody #MovieRecap #NetflixDocumentary #StickSeason #MusicDoc
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Welcome to The Deep Dive, and you know, if you're joining us today, you are right on time because we're
00:05unpacking something that I think, well, I think everyone on some level has really wrestled with.
00:09Oh, absolutely. It's incredibly universal.
00:11Yeah, exactly. So today, our source material is this remarkably candid documentary film. It's called Noah Kahan, Out of Body,
00:20and our mission for this deep dive is to look at a very specific, like a very modern phenomenon.
00:25Right. What happens when rapid, just massive success completely outpaces your actual identity?
00:34Yes. Like we're going to explore how someone even navigates that kind of profound psychological fallout and ultimately, you know,
00:41how they manage the incredibly difficult journey back to themselves.
00:45And it's a journey that feels just incredibly relevant right now because, I mean, we are so conditioned to view
00:51success as an endpoint.
00:53Oh, for sure. We think of it as the finish line.
00:54Right. Culturally, we treat Achieving Your Dreams as like the final scene in the movie.
00:59Yeah.
00:59Struggles are over, the doubts are gone, and you just ride off into the sunset.
01:02But this documentary, it forces us to look at the day after, like the day after you achieve everything you
01:09ever wanted.
01:10Right. And I really want you listening to this right now to just imagine that scenario for a second. Imagine
01:16you finally hit that ultimate milestone.
01:18The big dream.
01:19Exactly. You are suddenly selling out these massive arenas. There are literally millions of people screaming your name.
01:26Wow. Yeah.
01:26And they're singing the words that you wrote in your childhood bedroom right back to you, often with like tears
01:33streaming down their faces.
01:34You are quite literally living the dream.
01:37The absolute peak of what you aimed for.
01:38Right. And yet the second the lights go down and you step off that stage, you walk into a quiet
01:43backstage room and you just feel entirely, well, entirely lost.
01:48Yeah.
01:48You feel more disconnected from reality than you ever were when you had absolutely nothing.
01:52And that contrast, that is the core of what we're looking at today.
01:55Mm-hmm.
01:56Because this is not a standard, you know, self-congratulatory rise to fame story.
02:00No, not at all.
02:01The film is definitely not a victory lap.
02:04It's a very raw examination of the isolating nature of sudden starlight.
02:10It looks at the absolute fallout of achieving the impossible and then realizing it doesn't fix whatever was broken inside
02:20you.
02:20It's just severe emotional whiplash.
02:23I mean, the only way I can really think to describe it is it's like being launched into orbit without
02:28a space suit.
02:29No, that's a good way to put it.
02:30Right. Like you are suddenly up there floating among the stars and everyone down on Earth is just looking up
02:34at you in total awe.
02:36But meanwhile.
02:36Meanwhile, you are up there just gasping for air, wondering how the human brain is even supposed to process that
02:43level of sudden crushing pressure without just completely imploding.
02:48Well, the atmospheric pressure analogy is perfect for this because the documentary actually forces the viewer to feel that pressure
02:54change right from the very beginning.
02:56Yeah, the opening is so striking.
02:58It really is.
02:58To really understand the sheer weight of this situation, you have to look at those opening frames.
03:03The director makes a very deliberate choice here.
03:06I mean, if you're making a film about a massive pop folk star, the instinct is to start with a
03:11spectacle, right?
03:12Show the crowds, show the screaming, establish the fame.
03:15But they don't do that at all.
03:16Not even a little bit.
03:17It starts in Vermont.
03:18And it is so quiet.
03:20Like it's almost too quiet.
03:22You know, we're given these long, really wide shots of the cold air just hanging over empty roads.
03:27And you see these massive dormant trees standing perfectly still.
03:32It feels incredibly isolated.
03:34It really does.
03:35It feels like time itself has just completely slowed down.
03:38And in the middle of that vast freezing silence, we see Noah.
03:42Hmm.
03:43And he's not framed as a global icon.
03:46Right.
03:46There's no entourage or anything.
03:47Exactly.
03:48He is just a guy standing in the cold, basically trying to catch his breath.
03:53And before a single word is even spoken, the visual language of the film is telling you something crucial.
03:58What's that?
03:59That the central conflict here isn't about how he became famous.
04:02The conflict is about what the fame actually did to his humanity.
04:05And the sensory experience of that opening is just so jarring because of what happens literally right after.
04:11Oh yeah, the cut.
04:11The cut, you get lulled into this meditative, almost heavy isolation in the snow.
04:17And then, without any warning, we cut straight to the chaos.
04:21It's deafening.
04:22We are thrown into these sold-out shows, deafening seas of people, massive crowds who are treating his lyrics like
04:30a religious text, you know?
04:32Yeah, singing the bat, like, those words literally save their lives.
04:36Exactly.
04:37And it's sensory overload.
04:39But it's designed to be.
04:40Yeah.
04:40Because on one side of the screen, you're just assaulted by the deafening validation of tens of thousands of people.
04:47And then, we cut to him backstage, and he is completely alone.
04:52He just looks so drained.
04:53He looks physically drained, yeah, just staring at a cinder block wall.
04:57He looks entirely disconnected from the monumental life-altering thing that just happened, like, a hundred feet away.
05:03Right.
05:03He's occupying two completely different worlds at the exact same time.
05:07Which honestly makes me wonder about the actual psychology of that.
05:10I mean, when you are constantly bouncing between those two extremes.
05:13It's in a massive swing.
05:14It is.
05:15You have the deafening adoration where people are treating you like a literal idol.
05:18And then, total backstage silence, where you are just an exhausted person staring at a wall.
05:25How do you even know which version of reality is the real one?
05:28Well, the short answer is, you don't.
05:30You lose the threat of reality entirely.
05:32Wow.
05:33And the film really breaks down why that dual existence is so incredibly damaging.
05:38It shows us the mechanics of his rapid rise.
05:41Like, we see how fast the transition was.
05:44Yeah, it was overnight.
05:44Basically, yeah.
05:45Yeah.
05:45One moment, he's creating music in a small-town environment, largely unobserved, you know, just making art for the sake
05:53of making art.
05:53Mm-hmm.
05:54And the very next moment, he is ubiquitous.
05:57He is everywhere.
05:58The numbers just stopped making sense at that point.
06:01Like, his streams are exploding into the billions.
06:03The fan base is just multiplying exponentially every single day.
06:06Right.
06:07But the film highlights something crucial about that kind of exponential growth.
06:11It brings a very specific kind of suffocating pressure.
06:15Like, industry pressure.
06:15Well, yes, but more than that, the pressure isn't just the professional obligation to keep writing hit songs or to
06:23perform well on tour.
06:24The real pressure, the thing that begins to fundamentally fracture his identity, is the absolute demand to stay who people
06:32think you are.
06:32Oh, wow.
06:33Okay, let's unpack that, because this is where the dynamic between an artist and an audience gets genuinely complicated.
06:40It really does.
06:41Because the fans, they fall in love with a very specific, frozen-in-time version of him, right?
06:46Yes, exactly.
06:47They fell in love with the underdog from Vermont, the guy who wrote these raw, painful, incredibly intimate songs in
06:54his childhood bedroom.
06:55They've essentially built an avatar of him in their minds.
06:58That's a great word for it, an avatar.
07:00Yeah.
07:00Because they've formed a deeply emotional attachment to a ghost.
07:04A ghost.
07:05Yeah, because the person who wrote those songs doesn't exist anymore.
07:08The very act of releasing those songs fundamentally changed his life, so he can't be that guy anymore.
07:14Exactly.
07:14The sheer irony of it, the massive success of those deeply personal songs, means he doesn't actually live in that
07:21quiet bedroom anymore.
07:22No.
07:22He's on a tour bus.
07:23Right.
07:24He is living on tour buses, he's in luxury hotels, he's in backstage green rooms all over the world.
07:30But the expectation from the crowd is that he goes out there every single night and performs the avatar.
07:37He has to put on the costume of his past self.
07:39Because that underdog from the woods, that is the product everyone paid a lot of money to see.
07:44And the mental gymnastics required to maintain that illusion, that is where the burnout really takes root.
07:52Fame doesn't just, you know, hand you a trophy and leave you alone.
07:55It brings profound anxiety and a very strange kind of isolation.
08:00Yeah.
08:01This weird paradox where you are never physically alone, but you are completely isolated from genuine connection.
08:07Okay, but I want to push back on this a little bit, or at least, you know, play devil's advocate
08:11here for a second.
08:11Sure, go ahead.
08:12Because we hear this a lot, right, the tragic, isolated celebrity.
08:15But from the outside looking in, a lot of people are going to say, come on, he won the lottery.
08:19Right.
08:19I'd trade places in a heartbeat.
08:21Exactly.
08:22Millions of people would kill for that exact kind of pressure.
08:26You get to play music for a living and be adored by thousands.
08:30So why is this uniquely damaging?
08:33Like, is it really a crisis or just a really, really good problem to have?
08:37I mean, that is the exact tension the documentary anticipates.
08:41Yeah.
08:41From the outside, it absolutely looks like a good problem.
08:44Right.
08:45But the brain doesn't actually differentiate between good pressure and bad pressure once it crosses a certain biological threshold.
08:52Oh, interesting.
08:52The human nervous system just wasn't designed to receive the focused, intense adoration of 50,000 strangers every single night.
09:00Yeah.
09:01I guess we aren't really wired for that.
09:02Not at all.
09:03And when people say they love you, but what they really love is the idea of you or what your
09:08music does for them, that creates a profound loneliness.
09:12And no one doesn't hide from this in the film.
09:14You see the exhaustion just radiating off of them.
09:17You see the physical toll of carrying tens of thousands of other people's emotional baggage.
09:22And that leads directly to what I found to be the most heartbreaking shift in the entire narrative.
09:26It's the moment where his relationship with his own music fundamentally fractures.
09:32Because, you know, before all of this, music was his refuge.
09:35It was his tool for processing the world.
09:38It was his survival mechanism.
09:39Right.
09:39And I really have to call out something we hear constantly in our culture here.
09:43We love to throw around that phrase, do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life.
09:48Oh, right.
09:48It's on every inspirational poster.
09:50Exactly.
09:51Every coffee mug, every poster.
09:53And looking at this documentary, I think we need to accept that this is actually a deeply dangerous myth.
09:59I completely agree.
10:00It's a myth that totally ignores the reality of commodification.
10:04When you take the thing you love and turn it into your livelihood, the nature of that thing fundamentally changes.
10:09It has to.
10:10Because when your ultimate passion, the quiet, intimate thing you do just to soothe your own soul, turns into a
10:17high-pressure, globally traded product, you don't just magically get a cool job.
10:21There you go.
10:22You actually lose your primary coping mechanism.
10:25And think about how terrifying that is.
10:28Yeah.
10:28When he is stressed about the music business, he can't just go play the guitar to relax because the guitar
10:34is the business now.
10:36The refuge morphed into a rigid responsibility.
10:39Yes.
10:40It became a machine he had to keep feeding.
10:42And the psychology of that is devastating.
10:45Hmm.
10:46You know, you have this unique gift for expressing yourself.
10:49It brings you joy.
10:50It connects you to others.
10:51And it elevates your life.
10:53Mm-hmm.
10:53But as it elevates you, the structural expectations of the industry just grow heavier and heavier until the gift itself
11:01becomes a burden that is just way too heavy to carry.
11:04The starlight literally starts to crush you.
11:06Precisely.
11:07And when you're stripped of your coping mechanism and the pressure of the global stage becomes unsustainable, you hit a
11:13wall.
11:13Yeah, if you just crash.
11:14You can't just power through it anymore.
11:16The only way to move forward is to stop moving completely.
11:19You have to physically and mentally retreat to the beginning.
11:21Which brings us to the second half of the documentary where we see him return to Vermont.
11:26And the filmmakers make sure we understand that this wasn't just, like, a vacation.
11:30He wasn't just taking a fun weekend getaway to clear his head and go skiing.
11:34No, not at all.
11:34This was framed as an absolute biological necessity.
11:37He was returning home to survive.
11:39And you can really feel that necessity in the pacing of the film itself.
11:44Mm-hmm.
11:44The frantic, chaotic editing of the tour scenes.
11:47It just abruptly stops.
11:50The whole vibe shifts.
11:51Exactly.
11:52The camera lingers.
11:53The film allows you to actually take a breath alongside him.
11:56And in doing so, the geography of Vermont, the nature, the forests, the silence, it becomes an active healing character
12:04in the story.
12:05The environment definitely does the heavy lifting there.
12:08Yeah.
12:08The total silence and the stark simplicity of a small town winter.
12:11There aren't just pretty visuals used to transition between scenes.
12:15The physical space is actively pulling the poison out of his system.
12:19You can see it happening in real time.
12:20You really can.
12:21You watch him begin to write again.
12:23And not writing for an album deadline.
12:25You know, not trying to reverse engineer a viral hit.
12:28Just writing to process his life.
12:29Exactly.
12:30He slowly starts feeling real again.
12:32But the documentary is very careful not to present this as a fairy tale.
12:36Right.
12:37It's not a magic fix.
12:38The journey isn't a clean, linear path to wellness.
12:41No, it is incredibly messy.
12:44There is so much palpable tension in those scenes at home.
12:48Because as much as he needed to return to his roots, you can see the doubt creeping in.
12:53Oh, absolutely.
12:54Once you have seen the world, once you have experienced the sheer dizzying velocity of global fame,
13:00it is incredibly hard to just seamlessly slot back into a smaller, quieter version of your life.
13:07Because you are fundamentally a different shape now.
13:09Yeah.
13:10Your world expanded.
13:11And your psyche had to expand to accommodate it.
13:14Right.
13:14You cannot just shrink back down and pretend the expansion never happened.
13:17It makes me think of finding your absolute favorite childhood jacket in the back of a closet.
13:23Oh, that's a great comparison.
13:24Right.
13:24Like you crave the warmth and the safety it used to give you, so you try to put it on.
13:28But when you slip your arms in, the sleeves are halfway up your forearms,
13:32the shoulders are super tight, and it restricts your breathing.
13:35It just doesn't fit anymore.
13:36Right.
13:37It smells like home, and it holds all the memories of home.
13:40But your dimensions have fundamentally changed.
13:43Yeah.
13:43The jacket isn't broken, and you aren't broken, but it just doesn't fit the way it used to.
13:47That captures the emotional reality perfectly, because reconnecting with your roots doesn't
13:53act as a reset button.
13:55Going back to the freezing woods of Vermont doesn't magically delete the sold-out arenas
14:00from his memory or his nervous system.
14:02Right.
14:02They still happen.
14:03Exactly.
14:04And the documentary succeeds because it refuses to resolve this tension with a neat Hollywood
14:10ending.
14:11Yeah.
14:11It doesn't dramatize the struggle for views, but it also doesn't artificially solve the problem
14:16just for the sake of closure.
14:17It forces him to reconcile the two realities.
14:20He has to figure out how the global superstar and the kid from the woods can exist in the
14:25exact same body without tearing each other apart.
14:28That is the ultimate challenge.
14:29So how does someone actually do that?
14:32I mean, if you can't go back to exactly who you were, and you clearly can't survive as
14:36the burned-out avatar you became, what is the path forward?
14:40Well, the path forward is inventing a completely new way to exist.
14:46And that is what we see in the quiet art of balancing toward the end of the film.
14:50It is a very gradual shift.
14:52There's no major epiphany where he suddenly have all the answers.
14:56Right.
14:56There's no swelling orchestral music telling us he's totally cured.
15:00Far from it.
15:01It's just small, fleeting glimpses of clarity.
15:04Moments where the camera catches his eyes and you realize, oh, he isn't performing anymore.
15:09Yeah.
15:09He isn't worrying about the stream counts or the expectations of the crowd.
15:12He's just existing in the present moment.
15:15And those quiet moments of just being carry so much more weight than the loudest concert
15:20scenes.
15:20They really do.
15:21Because the profound realization here is that healing isn't about rejecting the success.
15:26The answer isn't to burn his career to the ground and go hide in a cabin forever.
15:30No, it's not about running away.
15:32The answer is building a strong enough internal foundation to actually survive the success.
15:36It's about learning to carry both the massive weight of the starlight and the quiet, grounding
15:42reality of the snow at the exact same time.
15:45That is such a powerful image.
15:47You have to expand your internal capacity, right?
15:49Yeah.
15:50So that the success becomes something that simply happens to you rather than something
15:54that completely defines your worth.
15:56But that requires a tremendous, almost exhausting amount of self-awareness.
16:00Oh, for sure.
16:00You have to draw a really hard line in the sand and know exactly where the performer ends
16:05and the human being begins.
16:07Which is exactly why the broader implications of this documentary are just so powerful.
16:12The film doesn't hand the audience a perfect, neat answer to the problem of sudden fame.
16:18It simply offers the raw struggle, the disorienting confusion, and the very slow, deliberate work
16:25of healing in between the noise.
16:27It isn't loud, it isn't overly dramatic, but it really, really sticks with you.
16:32Yeah.
16:32Because even though you and I might not be selling out Madison Square Garden anytime soon,
16:36the core emotion of this film is deeply, intensely universal.
16:40The scale of his experience is extreme, obviously, but the mechanics of the feeling, that's something
16:46everyone navigates.
16:47We really do.
16:47We've all felt that specific kind of disconnect.
16:50That terrifying moment where you pause and realize your life is moving incredibly fast,
16:55everyone around you is congratulating you, everything looks fantastic on paper, but deep inside,
17:01something feels fundamentally off.
17:03Right.
17:04You feel like you are just playing a character in your own life.
17:07Because we are all managing our own avatars, in a way.
17:10Oh, that's so true.
17:12We manage the expectations of our colleagues, the perceptions of our families, the curated versions
17:17of ourselves we present online, we're constantly negotiating the space between who we actually
17:23are when no one is looking, and who we feel we need to be to maintain our status in the
17:27world.
17:28So, when a film like Noah Kahan, out of body, strips away the glamorous facade of fame, and
17:34it shows us the raw panic of losing yourself to those external expectations, it's essentially
17:39holding up a mirror to our own daily lives.
17:42It really is.
17:43It makes us ask how much of our own authentic selves we are trading away, just to maintain
17:48our own miniature versions of success.
17:50And it leaves us with a critical question to consider as we move through our own lives.
17:54What's up?
17:55Well, if our true identities are forged and maintained in the quiet, unobserved moments,
18:00in the stillness of our own personal Vermont woods, so to speak, what happens to us in a
18:05modern culture that demands we are always on?
18:09Always connected.
18:10Exactly, always connected, and constantly performing for each other.
18:13When was the last time you allowed yourself to just be entirely unobserved without an audience
18:17of any kind?
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