What must it be like, attempting to maintain pop stardom in the post-digital world? Favorite-reference-turned-superstar Charli xcx seems hyper-aware of the pitfalls involved, and equally hyper-aware that her awareness won’t stop those pits from opening up beneath her at upload-fast speeds. No wonder she’s made a making-of mockumentary explicitly about the fear of missing her moment (or failing to extend it) and called it The Moment, knowing full well that said moment will almost certainly feel over by the time the movie actually comes out. There was almost no way to avoid this: Charli’s mainstream breakthrough album brat came out in June 2024, and its unexpected smash success meant that she wouldn’t be able to mount a proper arena tour in support until spring 2025, and of course any movie involving that footage wouldn’t be ready for release much earlier than, well, now, more than 18 months after the record’s initial bow (and a few scant weeks before another movie’s soundtrack serves as its unofficial follow-up). This is all especially true for this movie, because it involves fabricating and staging entire scandals and performances that never actually happened.
As such, The Moment raises questions about what the world-tour movie document is ultimately for, whether it’s boasting an A24 logo, a James Cameron co-direction credit, or the ability to save movie theaters. (Maybe that’s the best actual use case so far, provided you don’t have to hear it bleeding into your showing of Killers Of The Flower Moon.) Director and co-writer Aidan Zamiri, who has also worked on Charli’s music videos, takes aim at the form’s now-standard mega-branding, specifically when Charli’s label, led by Tammy Pitman (Rosanna Arquette), insists on taking creative input from concert-movie maestro Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård). Johannes seems to be modeled after Sam Wrench, director of the Eras Tour movie, as well as similar films for Lizzo, BTS, Billie Eilish, and Mumford & Sons, and clashes with Charli’s creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates) over the tour’s aesthetics, even though he’s supposed to just be directing the film documenting it, not the stage show itself.
The fictional version of Charli feels ambivalent about the whole thing—not only the tour and film, but the label’s eagerness to extended “brat summer” indefinitely (the movie begins, quite pointedly, in September 2024) and set her up with even more brand partnerships. So she waffles between asking Celeste to hold the line against Johannes and capitulating to her label’s demands. On her winding path to the tour’s opening, she has brief run-ins with other celebs including Rachel Sennott, Kylie Jenner, and Kate Berlant—though Berlant isn’t playing herself, scoring laughs as Charli’s makeup artist advising her to strictly limit her water consumption.
There are other laughs in The Moment, but it’s not precisely styled as a send-up of Charli or her image. Though she does summon a couple of unwavering deadpan anti-reaction shots where the camera simply holds on her as she attempts to flatten out her horror at various humiliations, the singer mostly plays her exhaustion and frustration straight, sometimes overdoing the put-upon superstar routine. The movie around her holds back on the comedy, too, even after assembling the raw materials: One terrific and pivotal gag about Charli making a promotional blunder involving a brat-themed bank card biffs its own reveal. Instead of a hard cut to a payoff which he could then escalate, Zamiri stumbles into a montage of its aftermath that’s funny, but not as hilarious as it should be.
Maybe he’s better with aesthetics than jokes. Zamiri adds some visual touches—aggressively strobing full-screen subtitles; multiple scenes shot through windowpanes in a way that adds a faint ghosting to the images—that feel like a pre-digital version of the glitchy noise appended to some of Charli’s songs; as on her records, this feels both expressive and self-conscious, even sometimes obligatory. The Moment doesn’t meet the gold standard of self-pitying emptiness set by The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow, but it does share with that movie the sense that the gorgeous surface is performing a kind of vamping at the behest of a music-video-thin story.
Yet there’s not a whole lot of music in The Moment, either; only snippets of songs are performed or played, with the most prominent needledrop reserved for The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” rather than a Charli original. It all contributes to the impression that Charli herself may be growing sick of her brat era, which she ultimately bids goodbye with considerable cheek. (At one point late in the film, she strikes a particular on-stage pose that seems like a direct spoof of Taylor Swift; presumably you can hear more about this on a horrible forthcoming four-minute song from the latter.) That mix of bratty irreverence and brat-y reflection is intriguing for stretches at a time, but not as entertaining as any given Charli xcx record. The film’s more serious side is compatible (if perhaps only unconsciously so) with the lyrics to Charli’s song “Twice,” which isn’t a brat tune at all, but the finale to Crash: “Nothing is forever / Lucky to remember / Stay up in the moment / All night, all night,” evoking a bittersweet gratitude about the fleeting nature of, well, everything, including pop success. When brat came out, Charli sometimes spoke dismissively about Crash, sometimes implying it was soulless, label-pleasing pop. She may well still feel that way, but in retrospect, that slagging off seems more like a part of her process. Which is good to know, but not essential to watch.
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