On its face, Charli XCX’s meta-concert-satire-mockumentary-autobiographical film The Moment reads as a subversive, arthouse-adjacent outing.
The British artist’s semi-fictionalized, more-real-than-real rumination on the pitfalls of fame — and the “brat summer” she inspired — has all the trappings of an experimental genre film after all.
A superstar musician playing themself in their own movie? Check. Themes of artistic self-reflection interspersed with trippy dream sequences and stylized, glitchy, slime-green title cards? All there. There’s even an extended Jesus-esque metaphor of XCX martyrizing herself for the fans.
In some ways, it reads as such esoteric insider baseball, you could hardly expect anyone but the most diehard XCX fans — desperate for any insight into the inner world of their hero — to list it as anything even approaching a favourite.
But how out there is it, really? Looking at the plot, we’ve seen most of this before: Following the incredible success of her dance-club themed 2024 album Brat, Charli XCX was both riding high on — and suffocating beneath the weight of — the pop-culture wave she launched.
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In real life, a presidential hopeful was busy associating herself with the bratty archetype extolled by the 2024 album. In the movie, a bank launched a Brat-themed credit card intended to snag the “young queer market” (“Do you have to prove that you’re gay?” a doubtful, concerned XCX asks in the film, before reluctantly approving the plan anyway).
And seemingly in both, sycophantic, artistically void studio execs frantically wondered how to keep this whole Charli and the Money Factory thing going. From the record label’s ivory tower meeting room, the decision on the best way to keep Brat on life support seems to be a concert film — that endlessly profitable (though creatively vapid) product that already earned Taylor Swift and Beyoncé beaucoup bucks.
The problem? Well, XCX is no Beyoncé. As we learn following her around the awkward meet-and-greets, stilted “What’s in my bag” interview rooms and self-conscious rehearsals for her ongoing tour, our star started this whole thing in the kind of scenario she finds most comfortable: no oversight, no expectations and with a focus on capturing the messy club esthetic where she feels most at home.
Now, a rotating cast of moon-eyed flunkies perpetually badger her for input — asking if she needs anything in a way that always seems to add more work for her instead of less. And everything is propped up on the expectation that Charli XCX’s irreverent, offhand genius will earn everyone around her their next paycheque; that the easygoing confidence infused in the public’s interpretation of Brat will extend through XCX into an unending series of profitable ventures.
Unfortunately, the celebrity — talented, though still in no way trusting of the spotlight suddenly shone on her — isn’t actually all that sure she knows what she’s doing.
Boiled down, they are elements found in the vast majority of music biopics. From Bohemian Rhapsody to Better Man to Back to Black, it seems nearly every modern movie about a real-life musician can be distilled as: “Transitioning from obscurity to fame, a tortured artist is misled by exploitative business execs into valuing profits over the purity of their product.”
And as The Moment‘s XCX drifts from honouring the original intention of her art alongside committed friend and stage manager Celeste (Hailey Gates), to falling under the sway of manipulative concert film director Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), things do harken to that cliché.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Given the fact that The Moment actually cares about crafting an intelligible, functional plot, it is already head and shoulders above its most obvious comparison: The Weeknd’s interminably obscure Hurry Up Tomorrow, the feature film interpretation of his album of the same name.
At the same time, it’s all supported by a surprisingly mature and nuanced performance by XCX herself — which perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise at all, given her obvious cinematic aspirations. The musician already played herself in last year’s Overcompensating TV series and also acted in the films Erupcja and Sacrifice.
This year, she’s slated to appear in Olivia Wilde’s I Want Your Sex, The Gallerist from Cathy Yan (who described XCX as “a cinephile through and through”) and the online horror Faces of Death.
In The Moment, it manifests in a seemingly honest and vulnerable attempt to expose her own failings. Walking the treacherous tightrope of pity farming, we see XCX betray her principles in the most honest way possible — not because of an inflated, out-of-touch ego but because she yearns to be good and successful as much as anyone else would, and is just as terrified as the suit-wearing PR people of the bankroll drying up.
It all puts The Moment in that incredibly rare arena: one of the few star vehicles to effectively evoke sympathy for hard-done-by, woe-is-me millionaires.
That’s before even addressing the genuinely impressive cameo by Kylie Jenner as herself. Meanwhile, Skarsgård is having the most fun he’s ever had; all that’s missing in his cartoonish villainy is the odd moustache twirl and a few damsels tied to train tracks.
But it’s not all sunshine and roses. Despite a pessimistically realist ending that turns the biopic formula of artistic purity on its head, The Moment tends to get tripped up in its own ambitions.
Simultaneously trying to make points about influencer culture, artistic exploitation, the travails of fame, the creative process — and how hard it is to be Jenner’s friend — The Moment‘s narrative focus gets a bit jumbled toward the middle.
The occasionally amateurish plotting was likely baked in from the beginning. Based on an idea from XCX, the film was co-written by first-time screenwriter Bertie Brandes and directed by XCX’s photographer, Aidan Zamiri.
It’s not the first time a celebrity shooter turned their lens to cinema. Of course, there was Stanley Kubrick’s turn from magazine profiles to 1952’s Fear and Desire. And Beatles photographer Robert Freeman made the hallucinogenic celebrity satire The Touchables, before maturing with the more coherent, and much superior, Secret World.
We could be seeing something more similar to Freeman here: Making the jump from fashion shoots to feature films, Zamiri displays some impressive instincts. All that’s lacking is the restraint, and resultant clarity, that comes from experience.
Which, for a first outing, realistically means The Moment is not the best thing you’ll see all year. But in terms of meta-fictional-artist exposés, inspired by and starring a musician playing themselves, in a narrative based on their recent platinum-selling album? Well, it’s at least top 3.
