In one of her first major acting roles, Charli is best when she’s being, what else, a brat, but also a shitty boss: playing her staff off each other, absenting herself from any real decision-making, and evacuating in the Escalade. And she’s nowhere near as hateable as Alexander Skarsgård’s odious Johannes, the Amazon-approved concert doc director. He’s almost too one-note: painfully square and straight, tasteless and pushy. He talks over women and he thinks Coldplay are cutting-edge—he’s totally irredeemable and permanently in charge.
The Moment is one-third mockumentary and, like, two-thirds reality TV. The characters perceive the camera, get annoyed when they’d prefer privacy, and never let go of their iPhones. Someone’s phone is always vibrating, a gimmick that often strikes me as contrived in a movie-movie but feels totally normalized in a reality-movie like The Moment. A.G. Cook’s score lights up for extra-diegetic dance sequences and other moments when Charli appears alone but otherwise lurks in the background. Even the establishing shots start to evoke those time-lapse interstitials on reality shows.
Phenomenologically you want to ask, Who is shooting this film? It’s a question The Moment never answers. The movie is “based on an original idea by Charli XCX” (she sold 1,500 T-shirts that say so) and the debut feature from Aidan Zamiri, director of Charli’s music videos for “Guess” and “360,” as well as a surreal ad called “Timothée Chalomet for Cash App.” The line between reality and fiction is super thin—The Moment’s primary subplot involves Charli shilling a lime-green credit card targeted at queer Zoomers (also reminiscent of Daylight, the disastrous LGBTQ+ banking startup) because she’s basically saying yes to anything at this point. As soon as they mention “BRAT credit card,” you know the backlash is coming.
But the comedic pacing could be a little tighter because sometimes, having seen the BRAT tour twice, I wondered if I wouldn’t rather be watching Charli’s actual concert film, and not the tacky one Johannes is making. Her live performance sequences are as electric on camera as in real life. Don’t expect to hear much BRAT music, though, because The Moment is not a movie about a concert film, it’s a film satirizing the social logic and financial incentives that structure the major-label video-content pipeline. That’s too bad because the music’s great. Johannes, you’ll notice, never talks about any of the music at all.
The Moment gives this quote to Benton Gates’ character, but the real Charli XCX is clearly determined not to make another “repetitive” pop star concert doc. The film she’s in is like a darker, younger-millennial update on the Lonely Island’s 2016 classic Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, with a dose of the multimedia metaparody in Alex Ross Perry’s Pavement film Pavements and an instinct for online that’s distinctly Charli. Popstar’s Conner4Real offended his queer fanbase simply by releasing a “no homo” gay-rights song (a moment to remember Rita Ora’s “Girls,” anyone?) but The Moment evolves the controversy to account for fintech, sponcon, scamming, exclusive presales for Chase Sapphire Reserve cardholders, and a pervasive atmosphere of chaos and fear. It’s 2026 to the hilt. Zamiri doesn’t really bother filming fans rushing Charli’s car or whatever—this has been the quintessential mock-pop-doc scene since A Hard Day’s Night but these days the fans rush you online.
