Director: Aidan Zamiri
Stars: Charli xcx, James Demetriou, Hailey Benton Gates
Nothing ever lasts forever. So sang Echo & The Bunnymen in 1997, and they should know. The fickle fashions of the pop industry come and go with erratic intensity and last month’s big deal can wind up this month’s has-been. Fame can be like a pop song itself; ecstatic, immediate, perfect but impermanent. And perfect because of that impermanence.
That’s a tough thing to build a business around, and movies have long milked the exasperated disconnect between concerns creative and capitalist. The latest to walk into this firing line is an incredibly game Charli xcx, star of her own enjoyably abrasive mockumentary. At a time when the Tour Film has become a booming business in its own right, her rejection the concept feels incredibly on-brand. Directed by multi-hatted music video whizz Aidan Zamiri, shot by feted indie cinematographer Sean Price Williams and of course presented by A24, The Moment is the Essex star’s rebuke of staid label interference and focus grouped strategising.
But it’s a rebuke that knows it’s in a catch-22 situation. It is a product and, as such, intensely hypocritical, garlanded with product placements and sponsorship deals. Indeed, a wonderfully ridiculous fictionalised partnership with Howard Stirling Banking on a credit card (“for young queer people”) ultimately turns Charli’s Brat Summer into her own Brat (down)Fall. Such is the inescapable machinery of the corporate music biz. A solidly successful dance-pop entity for several albums, Charli made brat at a no-stakes point in her career only to hit the zeitgeist and find herself jettisoned to international stardom. She’s taking advantage of that new platform, but also using The Moment to express just how jarring such a transition has been. How exhausting and how intoxicating. But it’s shrewd all over, and largely avoids the pitfalls of the tortured artist thanks to Charli’s own savvy performance.
We join her in September of 2024. The label (headed by Rosanna Arquette’s sharp-edged Tammy) doesn’t want Brat Summer to ever end, and so the tour and inevitable tour film. Charli is in simpatico with her current creative director and friend Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), but suddenly has a frivolous outsider thrown in to helm the film (Alexander Skarsgård’s over-egged Johannes). Exhausted from the album roll-out and facing a cacophony on all sides, Charli abandons rehearsals for a brief Ibiza getaway.
With five other starring roles on the slate for 2026, Charli at the very least shows a keen awareness for irony. In The Moment her on-screen variant has several moments of doubt in which she vocalises concern that she’s at risk of overexposure. The advice that’s clapped back at her (by Kylie Jenner, no less)? “The second people are getting sick of you. That’s when you have to go even harder.” And The Moment goes hard. From strobing credits to glitch-tastic intertitles, to Williams’ ultra-vérité docu-cam, we are always on the move and always being assaulted with new visual stimuli. Through this bombardment we get a sense of how this surge in popularity has affected Charli. And while in on her own gag playing a version of herself, she gives us enough earthen honesty and charisma to keep us on-side. Which is not to say it’s an idealised mirror image. Part of what keeps The Moment appealing is her all-too-human clumsiness while navigating new and uncertain terrains.
Rehearsals for the film continue even when Charli bolts abroad, and this negative space becomes a sharp metaphor for what happens when a personal project becomes a shared experience outside of one’s control. It’s the individual vs. the entourage. The passion vs. its consumption and cultural perpetuation. Charli’s biting back at the frustrations of becoming excised from her own artistic process, mocking and weary of the system she is forced to capitulate to. Even on her getaway she is harangued with phone calls. There is no time off.
Inevitably the spectre waiting in the wings is Rob Reiner’s seminal This Is: Spinal Tap, and credit where it’s due, The Moment stands the comparison. Smartly, perhaps, it draws mileage from a similar set of gags. PR snafus. Ridiculous stage props. Incompetent management (Jamie Demetriou’s wonderfully uncomfortable turn as point-person Tim). Celeb cameos tumble in (the aforementioned Jenner; Rachel Sennott), but it’s not a one-note love-in. Restricting much of the ‘drama’ to a sound stage in Dagenham does tend to limit the scope of the film, but Zamiri ensures that the energy is always ratcheted up. The last twenty minutes or so pushes a little too close to the absurd, and Skarsgård – clearly having a blast – slightly overdoes it. But the masculine encroachment of Johannes makes these attempts at scene-stealing kinda fitting. As much as anything else, The Moment documents the exasperation of being a woman in any industry still dominated by manspreaders whose cultural grasp is a good decade behind the curve.
At the end there’s just brat itself. Everything it celebrated and everything it rejected. Like a pop song you can’t hold onto it. You can hit repeat, but those instantaneous euphoric hits aren’t quite the same. It’s on to the next one. There’s even something wryly funny in the timing of The Moment, arriving just as Charli’s follow-up project “Wuthering Heights” lands.
It’s too late. The party’s over.
The Lost Highway Hotel 