The Moment, a mockumentary directed by Aidan Zamiri, follows pop star Charli XCX struggling to navigate the personal and creative sacrifices that come from levelling up in the public eye. The movie takes place a few months after summer 2024, infamously dubbed “brat summer” following the release of Charli’s critically acclaimed and culturally revered album brat. Prior to the release of the album, Charli XCX was respected in the electropop community and had already amassed a cult following, yet she only scratched the surface of mainstream appeal with her early 2010s hits like “Boom Clap” and “Fancy”. With brat being taken to en masse, and Charli now occupying a central spot in the pop cultural landscape, The Moment serves as a window into how disorienting it can be to go from niche pop obscurity to the defining artist of an entire summer.
The Moment uses its mockumentary label as a way to stay faithful to the artist’s (somewhat) true lived experience while retroactively making fun of the borderline hysteria surrounding the brat album cycle.
Those expecting The Moment to be like any other album tour documentary should be warned. Zamiri’s film is meta; it is a mockumentary about the making of a fake, in-world documentary showcasing Charli’s final show of the brat era. The Moment uses its mockumentary label as a way to stay faithful to the artist’s (somewhat) true lived experience while retroactively making fun of the borderline hysteria surrounding the brat album cycle. Sure, the brat craze in the movie is written fictionally, but it never feels fabricated or inaccurate. If only slightly heightened (a brat x Howard Stirling collab targeted at LGBTQIA+ youth serves as a focal point and major plot device), the film accurately captured how brat, a body of work predicated on authenticity, salaciousness, hedonism, tenderness, and scandal was repossessed by the public into a cheugy and tired fad. “We agreed to [saying] ‘brat summer forever’” lectures Charli’s team. “Don’t you just think the whole ‘keep having a brat summer’ thing is a bit cringe?” she asks. “It’s all cringe”.
The film shines when it self-consciously leans into the ironic comedy of the moment it is trying to document. In Act 1, a scene of Charli solemnly smoking a cigarette on her balcony is spliced with a fake The Late Show interview. Stephen Colbert asks Ms. XCX if she will be snorting lines of pumpkin spice to usher in “brat autumn.” The middle of the film sees a frazzled Charli seeking some much needed repose in Ibiza, where she runs into Kylie Jenner (a surprise standout who seems to be enrolled in the Timothee Chalamet school of acting) who compliments her for the brat dance that went viral on TikTok. “[The one with] the fruit” adds Jenner. Following this interaction, Charli, in a near fugue state, makes a post on social media misrepresenting her collaboration with Howard Stirling. This post incites a quasi-cancellation as well as a montage of brat flags being burned narrated by various micro and macro celebrities including Las Culturistas, the Swiftologist, and Julia Fox disparaging her and what brat stands for:“‘[I’m everywhere] I’m so Julia’? I don’t roll like that” says Fox.
The film is hyper-aware of the irony of audiences being more tied to the idea of a “brat summer” than to the artist who made it possible, and it uses this notion to great comedic effect. It takes jabs at Charli liberally, specifically at her brand in a way that is refreshingly transparent. Pulling no punches, the film’s strongest commentary addresses how easy and even necessary it is to sell out creatively in order to evolve in an industry that is so quick to pigeonhole its artists.
Tonally, The Moment is shaky. Despite having established a strong flow with the self-satire that is used to bring us into Charli’s world, every now and then the film strays to remind us that it is a serious project about a serious artist with serious ideas. Here, The Moment pivots from mockumentary to more of a drama that is shot with a hand held camera. Throughout the movie, spats in rehearsal or executive disagreements often elicit meltdowns in which our heroine delivers a profound (?) soliloquy about how, as an artist, she struggles with having to meet audience expectations and perform the cool persona she has created for herself. It is in these scenes where Charli is best able to showcase her developing acting chops in a very vulnerable and honest performance. Unfortunately, the tradeoff is that these scenes force the movie to lose the comedic momentum it worked so hard to establish, and the levity that sets the movie apart is bogged down by ideas that are more contrived than they are consequential.
The film is hyper-aware of the irony of audiences being more tied to the idea of a “brat summer” than to the artist who made it possible, and it uses this notion to great comedic effect.
These moments make the film feel like the type of tour documentary it is mocking. Obligatory clips of a pop artist taking a breather behind closed tours to express to the camera that they are exhausted and desperate to simultaneously please their fans (check), their label (check), and themselves (check) are a cliché staple of most concert movies, and The Moment is no exception.
What is frustrating about these heavy-handed sequences is that without them, the film is perfectly capable of conveying a very nuanced portrayal of stardom and artistic integrity without needing to explicitly spell it out for the audience in big, black, lowercase brat letters. The final scene of the movie is the trailer for the fictional in-world concert flick: Brat Live! (written in a Canva-ish graffiti font). This snippet of the concert features bastardized and appropriated grunge aesthetics, bedazzled female backup dancers moving in lockstep, faux-edgy vape and cigarette imagery, confetti, and a nearly unrecognizable Charli XCX, adorned in neon green hair extensions, rhinestone makeup, and a coltish smile. It is all very reminiscent of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023). “Bittersweet Symphony” by The Verve plays over this fictional trailer: a well-known, popular, and most importantly accessible song that is not even Charli’s own. Pasted over clips of the starlet winking at the camera or cheekily blowing airkisses to fans are rave reviews from critics: “Charli XCX like you’ve never seen her before” and “forget everything you know about Charli XCX”. It is a hilarious, poignant, and very clever ending that proves that it is possible to be both funny and deep at the same time, a concept that The Moment doesn’t always seem to consciously understand.
The Moment falls short of being for film what brat was for music, but it doesn’t need to reach those same heights for audiences to have a fun time. I am easily impressed enough to have been riveted by the movie’s promotion and lampooning of Charli XCX’s 365 party girl lifestyle (I could have watched Charli and Rachel Sennott do party drugs for another couple of hours at least), and I imagine it will have even more appeal to Charli’s “angels”: her cohort of devoted stans. If the goal of the project was to convincingly portray the 2024 cultural climate, terrorize the epileptic population, and put an end to brat once and for all, The Moment succeeds on all counts.
