Charli XCX’s The Moment Is Stuck Between Satire and Sincerity: Review

From the very first scene of The Moment, Charli XCX is battling the inevitability of being cringe. It’s just past the peak of 2024’s “Brat Summer,” and Charli’s being guided through a script for a TikTok she’s supposed to film by her social assistant Lloyd (Isaac Powell). She can’t be bothered, and neither can Lloyd — but alas, a brand deal is a brand deal, and the product shouldn’t care if its seller is “being cringe” or not.

Charli’s new film, helmed by music video director Aidan Zamiri, is all about these moments of compromise in the world of a pop star experiencing a breakthrough. It’s about the tension between the glory of success and the immense pressure she feels to replicate it, the human element of being an artist willingly exchanged for commercial gain and securing a wider demographic of consumers. It is also an attempt at a music documentary under the guise of a mockumentary; though the film, funny but often frustrating, doesn’t work too hard at deciding which one it is.

The Moment follows Charli as she attempts to keep the momentum of Brat going at the behest of her record label, initially trusting creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates) to produce her forthcoming headlining tour. But Amazon Music is paying for a concert film and documentary about the tour, and her label has hired the very pretentious, seemingly tasteless director Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård) to oversee it.

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Celeste and Johannes clash over their visions, with the latter’s efforts completely compromising the entire ethos of Brat for the sake of making the tour a typical pop spectacle and a commercial hit. Meanwhile, the pressure of having to maintain success, be both brand and artist, and chart her own authentic path eats away at Charli and causes her to break down.

Though it’s billed as a mockumentary, the framing of The Moment suggests it’s a response to being actually asked by her team to make a concert film and corresponding documentary about what she was experiencing. The Moment invents some central events of Charli XCX’s headlining tour in support of Brat, but it also makes it clear that this is the Charli XCX we’re seeing, not a separate, fictionalized character from the one we know. Her prior tours and albums are referenced; the songs of Brat appear and are used to contextualize the absurdity of her situation. The events of the film become dramatic alternate reality choices, but it is about Charlotte Aitchison, the young girl from Essex-turned-pop auteur.

So, Charli is using The Moment as a sort of meta-move in subverting the idea of concert films and Behind the Music-style documentaries. It’s not at all rendered with the same hilarity as, say, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping or This Is Spinal Tap, instead taking itself more seriously and attempting to depict the authentic disorienting tension that Charli felt at the time. The tone of The Moment, then, is a bit confused; it has some strong ideas about the cost of being a genuine artist in pop music under capitalism, but the alternate reality plotline and challenging narrative choices make The Moment much less subversive than it wants to be.

The Moment (A24)