Conan O'Brien Can't Stop

WHEN darkness falls on Building 34 here at the Warner Brothers lot, the home of the TBS late-night show “Conan,” a repose sets in as the fake palm trees and oversize Angry Birds props are put away for the night, and the show’s namesake host unwinds in his dimly lighted office, decorated with career memorabilia, vintage guitars and a bust of Teddy Roosevelt.

But when a dark mood hits Conan O’Brien, he says he ceases to be the talkative, excitable joke teller seen on television and becomes a cutting, sarcastic person his co-workers call “Mean Conan.”

“I’m really hard on myself,” Mr. O’Brien said, describing this persona in an interview on Wednesday. “I tease people constantly. I physically fight my writers, and they fight me back.”

Mr. O’Brien said his staff members regarded Mean Conan as “the funniest Conan, which is weird.” But he added, “Might as well let people know he exists.”

There is enough Mean Conan — not to mention Cranky Conan, Exhausted Conan and Vulnerable Conan — to go around in “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop,” a documentary directed by Rodman Flender that will make its debut Sunday at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex.

If the months depicted in the documentary, when Mr. O’Brien, now 47, wrapped up a short and star-crossed run at “The Tonight Show” and began a 32-city concert tour, seem overly familiar, its subject said they reveal a rarely seen side of him: “Conan in extremis,” he said, adding that during this time he lost 15 pounds and countless hours of sleep, and concluded that his need to perform in front of people might be a kind of addiction. He regards the film as an accurate portrait and a necessary exorcism, he said, though perhaps one he now feels uneasy about sharing with an audience.

“I certainly won’t go through anything like this again,” he said, “because if I do, I’ll kill myself next time around. I thought, this is going to come but once, let’s record it, and what’s the worst that happens?”

With a chuckle he added: “Well, it turns out the worst that can happen is that it can be seen by people.”

The period of Mr. O’Brien’s life framed by the film is not exactly underexposed. In January 2010 he very publicly declared (in an open letter addressed to “People of Earth”) that he would not go along with a plan by NBC to push his “Tonight Show” to 12:05 a.m. and insert Jay Leno at 11:35 p.m. He hosted his final NBC broadcast later that month.

Though his severance agreement with NBC (he was reported to have received $32 million) barred him from the airwaves until the fall, Mr. O’Brien announced that he would give a series of live performances, April through June, called the “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour.”

The tour appeared to be good therapy for Mr. O’Brien, who got to live his rock-star dreams by ripping television executives and performing his parody of “On the Road Again” for paying crowds.

But at the outset of the documentary Mr. O’Brien admits that he is “very angry about the way that I was treated” by NBC, adding that he is “the least entitled person you’ll meet in the world.”

The 90 minutes or so that follow seem dedicated to tearing down Mr. O’Brien’s assessment of himself, as he is relentlessly pummeled by the expectations of his fans and the rigors of the road. He is seen snapping at his wife, Liza; his assistant, Sona Movsesian; and the “30 Rock” actor Jack McBrayer, whose smiling Southern countenance collapses when Mr. O’Brien serenades him with a piano tune called “You Stupid Hick.”

By the time Mr. O’Brien reaches the Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tenn., in June, the temperature and his temper are at full boil. Frustrated by the demands of the festival’s organizers and told that his ordeal will be over soon, Mr. O’Brien replies, “I know people keep saying that, but that’s what they said to Anne Frank.” (When someone off -camera reacts to the comparison with shock, Mr. O’Brien adds, “We both took a stand.”)

Mr. Flender, the director, who has known Mr. O’Brien since the two were undergraduates at Harvard in the 1980s, said in a telephone interview that he did not set out to create a puff piece or commit character assassination but simply wanted to depict Mr. O’Brien as he is.

At the start of filming, Mr. Flender said, he told Mr. O’Brien: “I don’t want this to be U2 ‘Rattle and Hum.’ I don’t want to deify you. I want this to be honest.” He added that while Mr. O’Brien had final approval over the film, “he didn’t censor me in any way.”

Mr. Flender pointed to scenes like the one depicting Mr. O’Brien’s interactions with Mr. McBrayer (who is also seen dancing awkwardly as Mr. O’Brien strums “Dueling Banjos” on a guitar) as evidence that Mr. O’Brien ultimately enjoyed the tour.

“I think everyone around him is in on the joke,” Mr. Flender said.

Mr. O’Brien said his remarks about Anne Frank were not intended to make light of her experience, and that in sequences like the one at Bonnaroo, “that’s real fear you’re seeing.”

He added: “It’s the flip side of performing. When I finally get out there, the cerebral side of me and the worrying side of me, and the Catholic side of me just turns off, and I just go.”

Mr. O’Brien rejected the idea that he was still wallowing in his post-“Tonight Show” melancholy. “I’m ready to move on and never revisit that time again,” he said, arguing that the happy ending implicit in the film is that he is now back on late-night television.

He also realized that not everyone would accept this rationale.

“The last year has taught me that at this point in my career it’s not about trying to get more people into the tent,” he said. “It’s about trying to deepen the connection I have with my fans.”

Though the documentary does not yet have a distributor, Mr. O’Brien has made peace with the fact that it will most likely be shown in theaters or on home video, and reluctantly plans to attend its South by Southwest premiere.

After that Mr. O’Brien said he would give a copy of the movie to the therapist he has been seeing for the past 15 years: “I said, ‘I’m sending this to you because it’s everything we’ve ever talked about.’ ”