In April 2025, the pop singer Charli xcx posted a TikTok reflecting on nearly a year of her seminal album Brat: “It’s really hard to let go of Brat and let go of this thing that is so inherently me and become my entire life, you know?” she said. “I started thinking about culture, and the ebbs and flows and lifespan of things … ” She acknowledged that over-saturation is perilous, and that maybe she should stop, but “I’m also interested in the tension of staying too long. I find that quite fascinating.”
The frank, informal admission fit with Brat, a pop culture-shifting album that channeled, with stunning immediacy, the imperious ego and bristling insecurity of an artist keenly aware of her own precarious level of fame. Her ambivalence was understandable – Brat rapidly turned Charli, who spent over a decade as a fixture of pop’s so-called middle class, into a main pop girl, an artist played at midwest sorority weddings and used by a US presidential campaign. But her interest in “the tension of staying too long” also felt a little trite, the type of smart-sounding musing that dead-ends in self-awareness. Brat summer was heady, hedonistic, fun – a meme, an aesthetic, a vibe, a moment. That said moment passes? Well … yeah.
I felt a similar vacantness while watching The Moment, the visually hypnotic yet curiously shallow meta-mockumentary of the Brat era, which spends 113 hyper-stylish minutes circling her ambivalence over winning the zeitgeist without moving beyond that initial assessment. Conceived by Charli and written by close collaborator Aidan Zamiri and Bertie Brandes, The Moment, which premiered at Sundance, assumes a high level of fan literacy – Zamiri, the zeitgeist savant behind Timothée Chalamet’s genius Marty Supreme marketing campaign among other viral moments, ties the proceedings to the real Brat social media timeline with freak fluency – that has little patience for, and I suspect little reward for, those not in the know. But even for a longtime fan, The Moment feels uncharacteristically inert (though this being Charli and Zamiri, it looks very cool). Perhaps that’s because it attempts to satirize the music industry from the top, by proposing a somewhat listless counter-factual: what if, riding high on Brat summer, Charli succumbed to the pressure and compromised her artistic vision?
Though billed as a mockumentary, The Moment, also directed by Zamiri, is less Spinal Tap and more Black Swan, a ragged, borderline horror film of cracking under the pressure of getting what you want. In this funhouse mirror version, the singer plays a more pitched, volatile and transparently insecure version of herself in preparation for the Brat tour. Her world is filled with cuttingly demeaning promo (“what’s in my bag?”) and a coterie of flat music-industry stock characters: the access-coveting assistants (Trew Mullen and Isaac Powell), the feckless middle manager (Jamie Demetriou), the money-chasing record label people (Rish Shah), the tyrannical record label boss (Rosanna Arquette). Ever hip to the locus of attention, Charli recruits internet It girls (Rachel Sennott, gamely playing herself), cult-beloved alt-comics (Kate Berlant, criminally underused) and the colossal mass culture baggage of a Kardashian (Kylie Jenner, whose cameo is indistinguishable from a KUWTK confessional) to a populate her mildly self-skewering celebrity milieu.
The only person looking out for Charli’s artistic soul is her creative head Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), who capably plays the straight man against sharkish, toothlessly vampiric label folks – and, especially, against Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård), the cartoonishly self-important director brought in by the label to get a lucrative Amazon concert film. Black Swan Charli knows, as we do, that his motives are suspect and his taste horrific. But the pressures of staying relevant – of keeping “brat summer forever” – are such that she must entertain his glittery, anti-club rat vision (that looks suspiciously like the Eras tour … ).
I have no doubt that these characters have real-life corollaries, nor that the pressure to capitalize on one’s fame rocket must be immense. I admire the effort, against conventional logic, to make a period piece about a moment too long ago to feel fresh and not long enough to be nostalgic. The Moment is, in fact, filled with nobly against-the-grain elements: a warm, over-saturated palette that invites us into the frazzled psyche of a star; dynamic, verite-style cinematography by Sean Price Williams, which conveys the jittery reality of high-wire fame; a jagged, pulsating score by frequent Charli collaborator AG Cook that fits seamlessly into the chaos of a celebrity willing to play herself as a monster boss, and to toy with the expectations of a tour film.
In other words, smart concepts, talented people, solid blueprint. But there is too little risk – in the defanged satire, in the muddled thematic sprawl, even in a late-stage satirical swing that, for this fan, jumped the shark – to rise above its sharp-eyed construction. As comedies go, The Moment evinces the difference between structurally funny, such as a self-aware joke about a credit card for Charli to market to her young queer fans (“Do you have to prove that you’re gay?” she asks flatly), and actually funny; it’s a problem when Skarsgård, a consummate on-screen weirdo, draws more laughs by simply appearing in a beanie than any of the written lines. Against him and more seasoned performers like Gates, Charli, stuttering and flustered, comes off as mechanical, a student still struggling to push outside her well-worn persona.
She’s strongest – as is the film – in moments of quieter vulnerability, when Charli is stuck alone with her feelings, caught off guard by a facialist’s assessment of her ageing skin, spinning the collapse of her artistic integrity as liberation, of sorts, in a voice note. Sure. There’s a suggestion here of the real tension of staying too long: How do you maintain your humanity when everyone wants you? What is sacrificed when you get what you want? Who are you without it? There are answers, but The Moment seems satisfied just asking.
The Moment is screening at the Sundance film festival and will be released in cinemas on 30 January
