Early on in “The Moment,” Charli XCX (playing a fictionalized version of herself in Aidan Zamiri’s new mockumentary), sits alone on a tour bus before heading into a brand meeting – specifically, a brand meeting with a bank, who plans on creating a “brat” themed credit card for queer young people. (The specifics on how, exactly, the bank would know the young person in question was queer are as fuzzy to me as they are Charli).
The bus driver interrupts her blessed silence by asking who she is, and subsequently looking up her music. The first video he comes across is “Boom Clap,” a song that was released a full 10 years before Charli’s album “brat” – an album that spawned a cultural moment in which everyone from Kyle MacLachlan to Kamala Harris was participating in “brat summer.” “Boom Clap” is not nearly as dance or rave-influenced as “brat,” and was released in conjunction with the movie “The Fault in Our Stars” – or, as Charli puts it, the “film about kids with cancer.”
Written by Zamiri and Bertie Brandes, but based on an original idea by Charli herself, “The Moment” offers a scathing look at the corporatized artistic landscape that Charli exists within, pointing fingers at other artists who have given in, but also not letting herself off the hook. It’s about exactly what its title suggests, both satirizing and taking seriously the anxieties that arise when you suddenly find yourself at the center of a universe that moves on to the next big thing within weeks.
The scene with the bus driver is a funny, succinct way to point out not only just how long Charli XCX has been around – riding the wave of niche stardom with a few pop hits for over a decade before “brat” suddenly thrust her into the stratosphere overnight – but also how in today’s pop cultural landscape, even something as huge as “brat” felt doesn’t make you a household name. And when art ceased being enough to do that, the artists turned to branding.
The mockumentary camera crew documents Charli’s everyday life with special attention paid to the few weeks-long rehearsal process for her “brat” world tour. The creative control of said tour sits at the center of the film. On one side, we have Charli’s friend and creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), who has Charli’s artistic interests in mind, determined to make this tour the cocaine-fueled fever dream it was always meant to be. On the other hand, we have Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård), a puka shell necklace-wearing director hand-picked by Charli’s label who wants to turn the tour into family-friendly, faux girl power propaganda – basically, everything Charli is not.
Charli sits in the middle of these two forces, ridden with anxiety over whether to go with her artistic gut or play nice with the people who sign her checks. But, before rehearsals even start, you get the sense that she’s already compromising. In the beginning of the film, she’s shuffled from event to event by a crew of mostly incompetent yes-men (yes to the label though, not to her). During one sequence, she does a British Vogue series called “In the Bag,” where celebrities talk about the different items they keep in their purses – a shameless product marketing ploy, which Zamiri makes clear through montages of pulsating brand names and increasing sales that almost feel like subliminal messaging a la “A Clockwork Orange.”
“The Moment” points the finger at the system and the humongous artists who have profited from it (the concert that Johannes envisions for Charli doesn’t NOT look like “The Eras Tour”), but simultaneously, it’s filled with a healthy mix of anxiety and self-loathing about Charli’s own place in all this. It’s impossible to say how this version of Charli stacks up to the real one, but she certainly doesn’t let her fictionalized self off the hook. She’s at a strange level of fame where she’s ostensibly the most important person in the room, but her importance is too new for her to feel like she can risk it. In one scene, she apologizes to her stylist Mel Ottenberg (playing himself) for making him postpone his honeymoon. In the same breath, she aggressively insinuates that she’d do it again. They say fame can warp your brain, and Charli’s precarious position makes her both insecure and supremely self-centered.
There is an interesting thread in “The Moment” where the more Charli pushes against the idea of acquiescing to Johannes and the label, the more anxious she gets. In one of the film’s best scenes at an Ibizan spa, Charli’s told by a facialist that she’s too stale and cracked up on the inside for the facialist to do any good work on the outside. Almost immediately after, she runs into Kylie Jenner (the number of cameos in “The Moment” is out of control). While Charli’s face is red and blotchy, Kylie looks almost air-brushed. This is the face of someone who’s given into the machine. Someone who is so much more famous than Charli that she can laugh off Charli’s concerns – and successes – as trivial. “Apples?” she smiles breezily, referring to Charli’s song “Apple” and its viral TikTok dance. “So cute!”
This conversation with Kylie –with someone whose public persona is more brand than human being, yet seems more at ease with herself than ever – convinces Charli to go along with Johannes’ ideas, phasing Celeste, and therefore the one person who seems to care about Charli beyond the dollar signs, out for good. For the rest of the film, we watch Charli put up with his pyrotechnics and his weaponization of feminism (Skarsgård is hilarious throughout, but particularly when he models for Charli what a good girl power stance looks like), slowly becoming more of a commodity than an artist.
What we also watch Charli reckon with (and what it feels like she genuinely has empathy for, regardless of how sharp and biting this movie can be) is what it’s like to be under a microscope – to have every move analyzed, every decision discussed at length, every mistake blown out of proportion. Charli’s sharp edges made her a star, but those sharp edges also bring discourse at every turn. Where “The Moment” finds this version of Charli by film’s end – softening up those edges for her own sanity, deciding to take the easy road instead of the hard one, even though the hard one might be more rewarding – is a bleak look at just how much commodification has ruined artistry.