Like another larger-than-life A24 protagonist in the headlines this winter, Charli XCX is a self-mythologizing savant who has waited impatiently for the world to catch up to her greatness, a scrappy underdog propelled by extreme ambition and self-belief. She is freewheeling, selfish, and more than a little grating but also undoubtedly excellent at her craft and frequently entertaining. Born Charlotte Emma Aitchison, the 33-year-old British musician grew up an outcast, a frizzy-haired half-Indian girl bullied by her schoolmates in the majority-white town of Essex. She found herself in the underground rave scene, performing her first gig when she was just 15 at a derelict former pencil factory. Now, she’s the subject of a polarizing new movie called The Moment, though you can think of it as Charli Supreme.
Directed by first-timer Aidan Zamiri based on an original concept from Charli, The Moment is an autofictional mockumentary that goes behind-the-scenes of “brat summer,” when Kamala HQ rebranded its social-media accounts chartreuse green and a parade of “It” girls raised hand-hearts to her on tour. After years of influencing pop from the periphery, Charli was suddenly catapulted to the mainstream. She was everywhere, taking over Times Square and the Grammys. The central themes of The Moment — the predatory nature of the music industry, the compromises made between artistic integrity and commercial success — aren’t novel. But few artists have committed to exposing them quite like Charli. The songwriter behind major hits like Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” and Selena Gomez’ “Same Old Love,” she could have remained behind the pop-music scenes. Instead, she put her image on the line for closer study. She is both the puppet master and the puppet.
Some relevant meta context: The Moment has been released with expressed approval of Atlantic Records, to which Charli has been signed since she was 16, not always happily. “I remember having a meeting with [Atlantic] where they were like, ‘We just need you to post every Tuesday about your flaws and maybe you could post some pictures with dogs’,” she revealed on a podcast in 2021. The next year, she fulfilled her five-album contract with Crash, a self-proclaimed “major label sellout record” that was defiantly commercial in sound. “It could be deemed a performance art piece, but it’s also a personal test to see whether I can handle it and whether that makes me happy,” she told NPR. To many of her fans’ surprise, she resigned with Atlantic. Then came Brat, a return to her underground rave days that actually put her in the position to sell out.
Many of Charli’s real-life friends and brat collaborators — the actress-writer Rachel Sennott, Interview Magazine editor-in-chief and stylist Mel Ottenberg, and downtown star Julia Fox — star as lightly fictionalized versions of themselves in The Moment. Atlantic is presented, rather believably, as a soulless corporate entity whose executives don’t understand her but scramble to monetize Brat’s overnight success. In the film, they negotiate a partnership with the fictional Howard Stirling bank: a special brat credit card that Charli must hawk to her young gay fans, even though she worries doing so is both cringe and exploitative. They’ve also hired a big-name director, an unctuous Swede named Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), to direct the concert documentary for Charli’s first-ever arena tour. Johannes’ goal is to make the tour as family-friendly as possible, to the chagrin of Charli and her creative director, Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates). “She is literally singing about cocaine,” Celeste snaps in an argument. “Literally or metaphorically?” Johannes replies.
Charli is too busy to mediate. The movie sees her recording takes for radio promos, hopping onto Zoom calls in her limo, and forcing a smile in a skin-tight dress during the filming of a Vogue “What’s in My Bag” video. Greater success has meant less control over her schedule. Her well-meaning team —her feckless manager, Tim (Jaime Demetriou); sloppy social-media associate, Lloyd (Issac Powell); and assistant, Ana (Trew Mullin) — attempt to help but often appear to get in her way. Friendships are mediated through release forms and contracts, as demonstrated in a hilarious scene with Sennott, who in the film apparently holds up the release of the “360” music video because of her exorbitant airbrushing requests.
I get the feeling that the real-life Charli made The Moment yes, to dodge an actual concert tour but also to warn herself of what could happen if she loses her way. “If I go on holiday for three days I have a breakdown … That’s when everything around me is still, and I have time to question everything I’ve done,” she once confessed in a Pitchfork interview. The movie recreates this disaster scenario. Seeking escape, Charli flees on a three-day vacation to Ibiza in the middle of tour rehearsal, where a woo-woo masseuse tells her that her energy is too toxic to fix. A surprise run-in with an excellent Kylie Jenner (a highlight in the movie) sends her into overdrive. So she capitulates to Johannes’s vision, betraying Celeste, resulting in an embarrassingly corny tour that evokes her “Boom Clap” era and Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. (You cannot convince me that this film is not Taylor Swift shade.)
The Moment teases out how things could end for Charli: a rash social-media post that starts a national scandal, a snarky Las Culturistas episode, and a bad score from Anthony Fantano. But more than that, panicked sacrifices to her own vision driven by the fear that if she doesn’t act immediately, she’ll never get the same opportunities again. At the end of the movie, Charli leaves a tearful voice-mail for Celeste blaming herself for the mess that brat became. With that failure comes the freedom to restart. brat summer can’t, and shouldn’t be, forever.
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