The Moment is the new film starring Charli XCX, the pop star who took over the summer of 2024 with her album brat. It wasn’t too long ago to forget that brat summer was everywhere, even in the presidential election. This movie is marketed as a mockumentary, but it didn’t feel so much like that to me. While the characters kind of acknowledge the cameras, the film mostly deals with the effects of pop stardom and the anxiety of losing it after chasing it for so long. I think this film works for anyone, but if you have followed Charli’s career until now, as she’s always gotten close to full-on pop dominance, but it evaded her until brat just connected with everyone at the right time.
Here, the film takes place after brat Summer and before the beginning of Charli’s world arena tour. Her label, Atlantic Records, led by label executive Tammy Pitman (Rosanna Arquette), wants to exploit the success of the album through many corporate partnerships. Two A&Rs, Jamie Singh (Rish Shah) and Josh Campbell (Michael Workéyè), have the idea of making a concert film with famed director Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård) to direct it. Charli and her creative and stage director, Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), are focused on keeping Charli’s stage show pure to her ideas from the album and the feeling of being in the club at like two in the morning.
What I found profound in the film is how they showed patriarchal forces attacking Charli at all sides through the music business and heightening her stress about this wave of success. If she wants this to go on or end it? Can she sustain this success with her project? How women within the corporate system enable these pressures by forwarding the desire to make more and more money. The Celeste character is the pure artistic voice in the film, and throughout the film, Charli fails that connection to her intent as everything piles on and on.
Her entourage doesn’t really do much besides trying their best to give her what she asks for. These characters are flatter in some ways than the other characters, except for Tim (Jamie Demetriou), who seems to be her assistant. Still, through Atlantic, he’s conflicted in actions, and it shows well in the performance what his actual feelings are about what’s happening. The celebrities who appear in the film are on point. Rachel Sennott is great as Charli’s frenemy, and her scenes are hilarious. Kylie Jenner is also good in this as herself. It does feel like how you see her on the Kardashians shows.
Charli’s performance is what holds this together, as you always see her in some form of worry or distress. Her hair and makeup are also done well, as she’s shown not be a perfect looking pop star in the film and especially around other celebrities. She looks like a normal person, and I feel that communicates the person’s feeling about what’s going on around her, versus what we see when we watch a video, a video shoot, or a performance. She does very well, and I wouldn’t mind seeing her act in more stuff.
Skarsgård is great as a bad guy; he excels at it, and this one is great because he’s a manipulative director who takes over the whole project. He was wonderful to watch. Aidan Zamiri did a solid job as director, and the script he wrote with Bertie Brandes, based on the story by Charli, I feel, works as the coda for brat and the ending for this album, and a clear place that she’s moving on from this album. The editing by Bill Sneddon and Neal Farmer does a lot for this film; it connects to the music and the Charli aesthetic. It gives it a cool downtown dance club music scene, like a mood board, lookbook, and zine all at the same time. The film also has some great satire about the business and current Western society as a whole. There’s a whole financial bank plot that is totally unexpected but does a great job of pushing the film to its climax.
The Moment surprised me more because I think a lot of people don’t get it, and I don’t think it’s a mockumentary at all. It’s a film about an alternate universe version of Charli XCX and the brat phenomenon, versus just being a satire. While it made me laugh, it’s a solid look at the music industry and, in many ways, working as an artist in the corporate space and somehow trying and failing at keeping your artistic ethics intact. It’s an alternate world where her work got corrupted – what could’ve happened. So I liked it a lot. It banged.
Rating: B+
Level of Enthusiasm: 80%
