In the summer of 2024, it seemed impossible to escape the neon green and lowercase text of Charli XCX's sixth studio album, Brat. For a film about the seemingly endless season of wild parties, Charli and director Aidan Zamiri took a decidedly different approach than traditional concert films, which typically feature behind-the-scenes glimpses of life on tour and rehearsals leading up to a big show in front of a crowd of euphoric fans. "The Moment" is something else entirely, a bold foray into the mockumentary genre that satirizes the pressures of pop stardom and the struggle for creative control. It doesn't always work, but Charli XCX, as always, delivers a wild party.
Following an exaggerated version of the star herself, Zamiri's "The Moment" opens strong: Charli XCX dancing amidst strobe lights flashing from green to blue to red, with a flashing lights warning. It's September 2024, a few months into the new "Brat" era, but the party atmosphere dissipates once Charli catches her breath. She then travels to London, participates in a photoshoot for British Vogue, has tense Zoom calls in the limo, and finally returns to a party for some much-needed downtime. Being famous is exhausting.
Director: Aidan Zamiri
Writers: Aidan Zamiri, Bertie Brandes, Charli XCX
Stars: Charli XCX, Francesca Faridany, Errol Barnett
The whirlwind surrounding Charli becomes increasingly destructive as plans for a concert film interfere with her creative process and her relationship with her creative director. With the record label (run by Rosanna Arquette), managers, and now a very stubborn and condescending director (Alexander Skarsgård) all trying to dictate how best to keep "Brat Summer" alive forever, Charli XCX must figure out what Brat means to her and whether or not she should keep "the moment" going.
These are some of the incisive questions raised in Aidan Zamiri’s mockumentary about celebrity and its largely superficial satire, “The Moment,” co-written by Zamiri with Bertie Brandes and Charli XCX. Starring Charli as a distorted version of herself, staring into the void of the future in the two weeks leading up to her Brat world tour, the film explores her own celebrity image and reads the elegy of her album cycle before it has even begun. While the film seems aimed solely at die-hard fans, “The Moment” strips Charli of her rebellious girl image to portray a more vulnerable version of the pop star, riddled with self-doubt.
Combining the rock parody that started it all, Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap,” with John Cassavetes’ portrait of a wounded actress in “Opening Night”—two films Charli XCX has surely rated on her personal Letterboxd account, which has influenced a considerable portion of Gen Z cinephiles— “The Moment” features a striking performance from this generational icon. It is undoubtedly her best work in a scripted project to date, avoiding caricature, even as the constant puffs of Parliament cigarettes and the lisping (though geographically accurate) pronunciation of “Ibiza” hint at an exaggerated, flamboyant version of a late-millennial celebrity. Charli plays herself as a bundle of raw nerves, who can also be a bit of a handful with her team, as she grapples with what to do after her tour ends.
The 90s-nostalgic director Zamiri has developed a visual style of stark contrasts and patent-leather aesthetics for music videos by artists like Charli herself and Billie Eilish, but the grittiness and glamour of “The Moment’s” visual imagination belong to cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who brings his New York street-style filmmaking to what would otherwise be a fairly routine mockumentary about a pop star. It's a mockumentary format that doesn't inherently suit the film's essence.
A moment when Charli is snorting cocaine, and Rachel Sennott, playing herself, turns to the camera and tells them to "delete this," is a jarring reminder that we're watching a mockumentary, something we had almost forgotten given the film's fluid pacing and unpretentious style (aside from those intermittent title cards that also serve as a warning for people with epilepsy). "The Moment" is at its best when Zamiri and Charli XCX allow the film to tell its own story without drawing attention to its format or overusing references that might make some feel excluded. In "The Moment," Charli isn't the only one trying to prolong her summer success. There's her record label executive, played by a relentless Rosanna Arquette, looking impeccable despite the years.
There's her gay, fitness-obsessed social media manager (Isaac Powell), who needs more content to post, especially about an upcoming Brat credit card and savings bank aimed at queer creators (“How do you prove they’re gay?” Charli asks; this part gets laughs). There's her creative director, Celeste (filmmaker/actress Hailey Benton Gates), Charli's friend and the only grounded one, but with no other purpose in life than to cater to her employer. Meanwhile, a stylist has had to cancel his honeymoon due to tour delays, demonstrating both the slavish, life-altering devotion of those surrounding the British pop star and her indifference to what's happening around her.
These largely aimless characters orbit “The Moment” like some kind of internet celebrity guessing game. This revolving cast of characters makes the film feel like it's intended only for that audience, a private time capsule accessible only to those who come to the film as Charli's hangers-on, or to those fans with a deep interest in her cosmopolitan (social media) social life. Which, to be fair, is a lot of people.
Underutilized is the almost always deadpan comedian Kate Berlant as a meticulous makeup artist who tells Charli, “Tell me you’re not drinking water again!” when her client is about to faint in the chair.
Stealing the show, and then the entire screen, is the increasingly impeccable Alexander Skarsgård as Johannes, the “100% African” music video director, sent by the record label to inject creativity into Brat's tour rehearsals. Like a certain smug tech-finance professional he played in “Succession,” Johannes sees only four quadrants of dance in the brain and is hell-bent on polishing Brat’s aesthetic into the most marketable product possible, complete with Katy Perry-esque suspension wires that lift Charli off the Dagenham rehearsal stage so she can toss platitudes like flower petals to her adoring, screaming audience.
The end-of-an-era feeling is real, even though the era hasn’t quite begun—after all, we’re only at the start of a summer tour—and Charli is unraveling, drinking more, smoking more, pacing incessantly. The singer/star’s admiration for a woman on the verge of a breakdown is palpable, and she skillfully embodies the architect of her own chaos, even as “The Moment” increasingly offers a conventional framework to contain it. The film is witty at times, but too long overall; remember, “This Is Spinal Tap” clocked in at 82 minutes without any filler, while “The Moment” has a more rambling, documentary-like feel.
“You’re not going to die after one album cycle,” one of Charli’s entourage tells her. Are you sure? An impromptu trip to Ibiza only further dilutes her sense of self, leading “The Moment” into body horror territory. That sequence also features a placidly smiling Kylie Jenner, playing herself, seemingly under the influence of a Valium and Adderall cocktail that makes her appear deliriously euphoric. And with an undercurrent of resentment over the fact that Charli supposedly stole Johannes from her. “You have to level up,” she tells Charli. Unfortunately, in the film’s rushed final act, which also manages to be slow in all the wrong places, “The Moment” doesn’t level up, but instead plummets like a bird falling dead from the sky (or the ceiling of a rehearsal studio) mid-flight.
There's a cynical and darkly funny visual gag that culminates the film as its final shot, though audiences might find it frustrating that the film neither endorses nor critiques the inevitable consequences of late capitalism that it depicts. Is this Charli, the Charli of "The Moment," a product of the fame machine or a product of her own self-destructive neurosis, fueled by a creativity that was taken from her? (After all, she made the "brat" album on her own terms.) The version of herself that Charli presents is, however, a fascinating creation: self-critical, yes, and laughing at herself, but with the clinical distance of a telescope pointed at a star in formation. Watch this film with a group of Charli's friends and collaborators, and you, too, will get the joke.
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