The line between public radio earnestness and indie-rock cool has always been thinner than people pretend. Somewhere in the overlap sits Sleepwalk with Me, the 2012 film adaptation of comedian Mike Birbiglia’s autobiographical one-man show, co-written and produced by Ira Glass. On June 14 at 4pm, the film returns to the big screen at the the Community Theater in Catskill for a one-night event that folds together cinema, storytelling, and live music.
Released at the height of the American indie-comedy boom, Sleepwalk with Me occupies a particular lane of millennial anxiety cinema: earnest but self-aware, neurotic but warm-hearted. Birbiglia plays Matt Pandamiglio, an aspiring stand-up comic trapped between a stagnant career and a long-term relationship he no longer knows how to navigate. As his emotional uncertainty deepens, his sleepwalking spirals into increasingly absurd and dangerous episodes, turning repressed dread into physical comedy. The film premiered at Sundance, where it won the NEXT Audience Award, before slowly building a devoted following through word of mouth, late-night streaming recommendations, and the evangelical enthusiasm of public-radio listeners.
A decade later, the movie feels oddly prescient. Long before every comedian turned vulnerability into content strategy, Sleepwalk with Me understood the strange tension between performance and confession. It’s a breakup story wrapped inside a sleep-disorder comedy, and a career panic spiral folded into an indie romance.
The post-screening conversation may be as much of a draw as the film itself. Glass—whose radio program “This American” Life helped redefine narrative nonfiction for an entire generation—will appear for a live Q&A moderated by filmmaker and writer Susanna Fogel, whose credits include Booksmart, The Spy Who Dumped Me, and the HBO Max thriller-comedy series ‘The Flight Attendant.” Fogel and Glass reportedly met during a post-screening Q&A years ago, giving the evening an appropriately meta quality: a conversation about a film born from storytelling culture moderated by two people whose own relationship emerged from that world.
As if the lineup weren’t already calibrated to trigger intense nostalgia among former college-radio devotees, the evening also features a live pre-film set by Mates of State. The husband-and-wife duo of Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel contributed music to the Sleepwalk with Me soundtrack and spent years touring as the house band for “This American Life.’ Their bright, kinetic indie pop became a defining sound of the 2000s underground, balancing sweetness and nervous energy in ways that mirror the film itself.
The event arrives at a moment when repertory screenings increasingly as communal cultural experience—part screening, part live podcast, part reunion for people who still remember when discovering an indie film or band felt like joining a secret club.
