Pop star Charli XCX takes a critical look at the music business, capitalism, fame and herself in The Moment (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a mockumentary that satirizes her own musical/promotional/viral pop-cultural saturation. You may recall that “moment” in 2024, dubbed Brat Summer, when the marketing campaign behind her hit album brat threatened to cover the world in a shade of queasy green and encouraged her fans to embrace and feel empowered by their own messiness – and rocketed the singer and songwriter from a decade of critically acclaimed, mid-tier success to near-instant overnight crossover megastardom. (Even Kamala Harris glommed onto the Brat Summer phenomenon during her presidential campaign, which, well, let’s not get into correlation/causation arguments right now, OK?) The film stars Charli as a version of herself trapped between her artistic vision and gross commercialism; she formulated the movie with music video director (and marketing whiz behind Timothee Chalamet’s promotional strategy for Marty Supreme) Aidan Zamiri, and together they make sure the end product is just as messy as Brat Summer itself.
The Gist: Brat Summer is winding down. It’s Sept. 2024 and in the words of Charli XCX, “it’s all cringe.” She’s moved records and logged the streams and made appearances and sold out arenas and now she just seems tired, and wired in a bad way, caught in the eye of a tornadic fury of media and managers and handlers and fans and corporate interests. Read into her mannerisms and you’ll find someone who’s usually confident and assured but may be wavering in that assured confidence now that so much of Planet Earth is looking at her (just like she always wanted?). The biggest sign that Brat Summer probably needs to end isn’t the ridiculous and phony promotional appearances, but management and record-label pressure to “keep the Brat thing going” despite the fact that it was formulated from the very beginning to be temporary. It’s called Brat Summer, not Brat Forever. Party-girl Charli knows the party has to end sometime – and maybe I’m reading into this a bit too much, but that notion clashes mightily with late-capitalist philosophies that unrealistically expect profits to never, ever stop growing.
Actually, I’m not reading into it too much: Charli’s cringiest of cringes is the Brat Card, a credit card that offers a free Charli XCX concert ticket with every new account. There’s no mention of the interest rate and one assumes it’s among the highest ever put forth but never mind because now you can whip out the frogpuke-colored card for all your purchasing needs! The bank sees it as a crossover promotion that opens the door to piling crippling debt atop Charli’s queer fanbase. “Do you have to prove you’re gay?”, Charli asks about the application process, but she never gets an answer. She sighs deeply, yada-yadas a verbal agreement with the bank’s lawyer, and dives into preparations for the Brat tour, which of course absolutely MUST be exploited for a highly profitable concert film. See, if one doesn’t milk every last nickel out of one’s pop-cultural ubiquity, it’s like going to church and never acknowledging Jesus – or something like that, and if you think that comparison is a bit sloppy, well, let’s just call that my Brat Metaphor.
Among the cadre of suits and sycophants surrounding her, Charli’s most trusted confidant is her creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), who’s dead-set on maintaining Charli’s signature trashy aesthetic and artistic vision, e.g., flashing the c-word and b-word on digital video screens during concerts while harsh strobes flash and oppressive machine-gun beats play. How else would one burn the Brat bridge behind them? But the concert film director, Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgard), would rather tone it down a bit. Make it a little more open-armed than confrontational by, say, replacing the “h” in the b-word with a hashtag, and penning some Hallmarkish remarks for Charli to recite between songs. Make it a bit more, dare I say, Swifty? Celeste fumes and Charli, well, she goes on vacation for a few days so she can be criticized by the woman giving her a facial, and offered terrible advice from Kylie Jenner (playing herself). And Charli may be stressed and anxious and feel like she’s being pulled in multiple directions at once, but maybe she’s the only one who realizes that trying to keep Brat Summer going through fall and winter and spring and next summer and next fall and on and on is a fool’s game.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The Moment exists smack in the middle of the spectrum between The Weeknd’s vanity project Hurry Up Tomorrow and This is Spinal Tap. You just CAN’T watch Charli’s 15-foot stage-prop cigarette lighter and not invoke Stonehenge.
Performance Worth Watching: Sarsgard’s character is the film’s most obvious and unsubtle caricature – but also the most broadly recognizable, and maybe that’s why he draws the biggest laughs.
Our Take: Conceptually, The Moment explores far beyond the boundaries of a music-biz satire by depicting greedy dipshits waging a hopeless war against time itself. International pop-cultural crossover success is, by its very nature, like a flame that burns bright and hot for a few seconds before running out of fuel. This movie version of Charli lit it, stepped back and watched it burn – and now cringes as she watches numerous desperate dopes, greedy for money and attention, huff and puff and wheeze at the ashes, hoping to revive a few smoldering embers. Conventional wisdom tells us, and Charli of course, that success and fame are fleeting, especially in the social media culture that nourished Brat Summer before directing its shattered attention elsewhere.
Hence, why The Moment is titled The Moment instead of Eternity. And it’s understandable that Charli XCX The Character would get caught in that moment, nearly crippled by uncertainty. That’s the humanity within the drama, some of which is quite likely based on real events (in Charli’s own words, “maybe some of it is true”), and feasibly so, since external pressures are inevitable when one achieves massive crossover success.
This is nothing new within music-business dramas; the last biopic I saw, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, put its title figure at a crossroads, wrestling with the internal artistic urge to make the brooding Nebraska album and fending off label and management suits who wanted him to record the listener-friendly Born in the U.S.A. (of course, he eventually made both). Charli’s skewed approach to familiar subject matter is admirable, as she and Zamiri amplify the anxiety with a jittery verite visual approach that sells the “reality” of the story as it stirs in broad caricatures of label CEOs (Rosanna Arquette plays the hawkish Atlantic Records head), clueless-but-friendly drivers, a goofball makeup artist (a scene-stealing Kate Berlant) and, of course, the concert-film director who says he wants nothing more than to maintain the artist’s integrity at the same time he takes a sandblaster to her every perceived edge.
But, as They say, playing yourself is harder than it looks, and Charli’s on-screen persona is too thin and gauzy to anchor a film, especially one that’s unwieldy with ideas and uncertain about what will and won’t be funny for audiences. Some of The Moment is inside baseball – I appreciated Rachel Sennott’s drop-in cameo in which she asks Charli if she’s doing “a Joaquin Phoenix thing”; anything too meme-coded will lose a lot of Millennial-and-ups; those tuned into real-life Charli’s every interview, musical guest appearance and social media post will inevitably find more depth in the film’s subtext. Some of it’s self-aware, some of it’s metatextual, some of it’s real, some of it’s parody. But in this moment, who is Charli XCX? The character is fuzzy and ill-defined in her motives and desires, and I’m tempted to push the galaxy-brained take and say that’s intentional, that the film being messy and noncommittal is the whole underlying philosophy of Brat Summer – and that killing Brat Summer is necessary for her to achieve some clarity. Maybe the movie is the final shovelful of dirt on its coffin.
Our Call: The Moment has me teetering between fascination and ambivalence – but ever so slightly more toward the former than the latter. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
