Charli xcx Mockumentary Strictly for the Fans

Those of us who somehow missed out on “Brat Summer” — busy having other, less exciting seasons of our own, I guess — might turn to the new film The Moment in search of a vicarious, retroactive thrill. A mockumentary about pop idol Charli xcx navigating the period between the release of her watershed 2024 album, Brat, and its subsequent world tour, The Moment would ideally offer both a very recent nostalgia trip for those who were swept up in that cultural epoch, and a whirlwind, behind-the-scenes catch-up for the rest of us. 

But writer-director Aidan Zamiri’s film instead takes place in the months between Brat’s two public lives. It offers a backstage glimpse of what might have been as Charli attempted to process her brief, shining moment as queen of the zeitgeist and began wondering when enough might be enough, when it would be time to move on to a new era (I think other musicians are allowed to use that term). The Moment is not a concert film about the tour. Nor is it an account of the mad, hot months preceding it, during which the album and its pithy, party-girl ethos came to define a strange, ragged, ultimately doomed hope that particularly gripped America as it finally staggered out of a pandemic and hurtled toward a do-or-die election. (Turns out we died.) 

It’s a comedy, mostly, a satire of the vagaries of stardom and branding, populated by cool people and shot in choppy, wandering, shaky-cam vérité. I had naively anticipated more of an explainer on Brat’s whole deal — a sort of thesis breakdown of the phenomenon’s evolution and philosophy. But the film, co-written by Bertie Brandes, assumes its audience is already well-versed in all that. Which makes me perhaps the wrong person to review the movie; you maybe have to be fully on board with the Charli xcx circus to really appreciate what a movie about it is trying to do. 

For the more casual viewer, The Moment is entertaining enough, for a while. The film’s opening stretch whizzes along as Charli — a natural, engaging actor — is dragged from one banal, vaguely embarrassing meeting or negotiation to another, sketchy vignettes usually punctuated at their close by Charli putting on her dark sunglasses and retreating back inward. Zamiri aims to send up the crass monetization of a cultural boom, turning up the film’s absurdity knob to highlight the very real ways in which record labels and other corporate interests attach themselves vampirically to artistic success.

The Charli of the movie is made to hawk a Brat-branded credit card, demographically targeted at the young, queer and presumably financially unsteady people who make up the core (or, one pillar) of her fanbase. It’s a wacky invention, though credible enough in these times of limitless monetization. The movie seems keen to the now-ancient and passé concept of selling out, though not terribly interested in actually reviving or adopting Gen X’s principled superstition against it. It is ultimately apathetic in the face of corporate creep, which is treated as an annoying, amusing inevitability that can be managed with compromise and compartmentalization; Charli goes along with it, while also distancing herself from it. 

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Beyond the credit card, The Moment locates most of its zany humor in the presence of a hacky, inexplicably successful director played by Alexander Skarsgard, hired by Rosanna Arquette’s blithe record executive to shoot the film version of Charli’s impending tour. This vain dope wants to toss out all the good ideas that Charli and her steadfast creative partner, played by Hailey Benton Gates, have come up with for the show, looking to replace their carefully refined aesthetics with stupidly ornate stuntery. Some of these interludes of creative clash are funny, but the joke runs dry fairly quickly. 

As it plods into its second and third acts, The Moment seems at cross purposes with itself. Is this a biting farce about the vacuities of celebrity industry? Or is it an earnest reflection on what it was to live at the center of this good-natured but still highly pressurized mania? Zamiri and Charli ultimately choose the latter pose, which tilts the film into self-serious indulgence. Like many a real music documentary, The Moment eventually treads into the realm of hagiography. 

I wish that it instead went harder on the spoofy stuff, that it added ever more antic comedy as it rollicked along. But The Moment is too self-conscious to really commit to such silliness. The filmmakers do still want this project to be cool, after all, and to communicate that the Brat phenomenon really was quite a big deal. I’ve no doubt it was. But it’s also well in the past by now. Trends like it are too fleeting to support the kind of mythology that The Moment tries to graft onto it. 

Mileage will vary, of course. Those devoted to the Charli cause will no doubt get more out of the film than an out-of-touch oldster like myself ever could. But the film probably should have endeavored to be more broadly accessible and entertaining if it wanted to be anything more than a fandom’s supplemental material. At the end of the movie, it’s all too easy to shrug one’s shoulders and dismiss it with a resigned, “Guess you had to be there.”