Charli xcx is 'The Moment'

Image Credit: A24 via Wikimedia

I know I’m late to the party with this review, but that’s what Charli would want, so here we are. 

Take yourself back two years. Charli xcx, still ‘famous but not quite’, stalks into a Boiler Room warehouse and delivers a career-defining set. A wall in Brooklyn is painted neon green. The internet’s It girls assembled for the 360 music video. A month later, the album dropped, and Charli became inescapable.

While Brat saw Charli monopolise the culture, taking total control of the zeitgeist, her new mockumentary, ‘The Moment’, imagines what would have happened if everything had gone horribly wrong. If ‘Brat Summer’ was the euphoric fluorescence of the ultimate club night, this film is the aftermath: when the lights turn on, the glamour wears off, and you’re left stumbling home in a haze of self-loathing.

Eclipsed by her own creation, the Charli of ‘The Moment’ (played, of course, by herself) is burned out, lost, and fundamentally terrified by the realisation that ‘Brat Summer’ can’t last forever. Introduced in a pulsing montage of flickering club lights, we follow as she’s gradually forced to compromise her artistic vision (embodied by her creative manager Celeste) and succumb to the inauthentic commercialism of the modern music industry, represented, in all its insidiousness, by Alexander Skarsgård’s ‘Johannes’. Rather than the high priestess of pop we know her to be, this fictional Charli is just another casualty of the 21st-century machine.

Explorations of the ‘dark side of fame’ have become wearisome and honestly quite patronising, but ‘The Moment’ remains hyper-aware of the risks of its message. Charli’s death spiral is, at least partly, self-inflicted - she’s a star who prioritises preservation over innovation, who allows her creative instinct to be hollowed out by the ‘men in suits’, and lets the meaning of her art slip through her fingers.  

As a meditation on ‘coolness’ (whatever that means), Zamiri’s film explores the exhaustion that comes with being an ‘It girl’. There’s not one scene where Charli is left to revel in her success; instead, she’s constantly barraged by the requests of her comatose manager (played by Jamie Demetriou) and leashed by the insatiable greed of her label - pulled apart by the very forces that facilitated her rise. The body of the female starlet has always been a cultural battleground, and Charli’s is bruised, bloody, and by the end, broken. It turns out that maintaining the persona requires a whole lot more than donning a pair of shield sunglasses and treating the entire world like your personal runway. By the time the credits rolled, I was left thinking that, if this is what it means to be an icon, maybe I never want to hear a crowd scream my name.

I would note that this film isn’t meant for everyone. If you’re not a Charli fan - one of the ‘little gay criminals’, as a caricatured label exec refers to them - you probably won’t get it. The screenplay is genuinely funny, but the humour relies on an awareness of Charli’s artistic identity. If you don’t laugh at the suggestion of a family sitting down to watch a concert film of the Brat Tour, or the image of Charli strung up in a harness, then you probably aren’t the intended audience. While this may make ‘The Moment’ slightly inaccessible, that’s part of the movie’s point: art shouldn’t be made for everyone; not everything has to have mass appeal, and not everything should. 

Despite being a completely fictionalised account of the Brat era, ‘The Moment’ feels piercingly authentic - a recreation of a nightmare the ‘Von Dutch’ singer might have had in the throes of her ascendency. Charli asks us a simple question: ‘Once you’ve achieved your dream, where do you go?’ And while she doesn’t give us an answer, we’re left to wonder whether it’s better to simply let some things die. After all, ‘you can’t dread the end when it’s over’.