Travis Barker didn’t want to do this documentary. He’d been filming Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear since 2017, chronicling his life dealing with the debilitating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder since surviving a plane crash nine years earlier. In an incident that made national headlines at the time, the Blink-182 drummer and three friends were in a private jet, heading home from Columbia, South Carolina, when the landing gear burst into flames. Two of his best friends were killed. A third passenger, his close friend and collaborator DJ AM, died a year later of an overdose. Barker was in intense emotional and physical pain. He was suicidal. He wasn’t sure he’d ever make it back.
The drummer had already been scared of planes, so after the 2008 crash, he simply stopped taking them. In fact, the documentary starts with Barker in his room on the Queen Mary 2, sailing across the Atlantic, since that’s the only way he could tour Europe. But this symptom of his PTSD created a strain between the film’s producers and their subject: The natural way for the documentary to end would be to have Barker get on an airplane for the first time in years. But, as Barker has explained in recent interviews, that was not an option at the time. It wasn’t until his now-wife, Kourtney Kardashian, surprised him with a trip to Mexico in 2021 that he went back in the air. A few years later, he decided it would be OK to take another leap, and return to Louder Than Fear, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, and is now available on Hulu and Disney+.
