Early into The Moment, a kind of Spice World for recreational cocaine users, the pop star Charli xcx (playing a grouchy and frazzled version of herself) is forced into small talk with the middle-aged man driving her to a rehearsal space in Dagenham. He asks her what she does for a living. “Dance pop,” she tells him, ambivalently. “So like Leona Lewis?” he replies. Told her name, the driver Googles her. “Charli xcx” appears lower in the search results than sensitive pop bro Charlie Puth and the archaic internet meme “Charlie bit my finger”. He vaguely recognises a hit she had a decade ago, the plasticky Fault in Our Stars anthem “Boom Clap”, that she says was written “for a movie about kids with cancer”. She pouts, grumbles, and hides behind her sunglasses.
The Moment, directed by Aidan Zamiri and based on a concept by Charli herself, is an existential horror movie disguised as a mockumentary, about a pop star so used to flopping that she’s found a kind of comfort in it, but who suddenly becomes a very, very big deal. It’s inspired by Charli’s ascent in 2024 from prolonged B-tier pop stardom to cultural hegemony, the key being Brat, her sixth record and an album full of buzzing, clawing, galaxy-brained earworms about swagger and self-doubt.
It rapidly became its own industry. There were memes, TikTok dances, trend pieces, a new sludge-green colour palette for tote bags and make-up ranges, as well as speedily assembled knock-offs by lesser pop girlies. And it went on, and on and on. Brat Summer beget Brat Winter and Brat Summer 2, like some endless Bratty hangover. The Moment interrogates how weird it all was, with one of the doyennes of pop’s middle-class – theretofore exclusively beloved by the young, the queer and the mean – suddenly talked about on Fox News, discussed in newspaper columns, lapped up by both the cultural elite and, via the Brat-green colouring of Kamala Harris’s doomed presidential campaign, the liberal political establishment. Brat was unspeakably cool, then a bit cringe, then cool again. I think.
For Charli herself (the real one), The Moment is both a savvy bit of brand management and a funeral pyre, designed to kill off one Charli era and introduce another. For she’s a movie star now, with The Moment arriving a few weeks after she made a cameo in the silly, scattered costume drama 100 Nights of Hero, and ahead of the films she’s made with cult faves such as Gregg Araki and Romain Gavras. It’s a key change she’s been eager for. “I’ve been on the same hamster wheel since I was 15,” she told A Rabbit’s Foot in December. “I’m in control of every aspect of my music – the sound, my image, the performing. But with cinema, I have to surrender myself to someone else’s vision.”
It’s also a bit cooler than the alternative. Brat had legs, serving as the launching pad for two tours, a remix album and a Glastonbury Other Stage headlining set. But despite its reach, it didn’t inspire Charli to jump back into the studio and pump out a quick sequel. Doing that would be more rote, more inevitable, more Sabrina Carpenter. Instead she pivoted, first to her soundtrack for Wuthering Heights – which sublimely matched the eroticism, drama and violence of Emily Brontë’s source material – and then to acting, and specifically acting for auteurs and in movies, like The Moment, produced by chic indie distributor A24. “My penchant for ‘coolness’ probably points to my deep rooted insecurity (or perhaps I’d even go as far as calling it a fear) of being boring,” Charli wrote on Substack in December. “To be boring is to die right there on the spot. Give up, give in, go home, stay home, end it all.”
Movies, then, represent a career shift that comes with inherent risk but incredible cool points if it goes well. And it makes sense for an artist who’s never seemed comfortable resting in one place for too long. Historically, Charli eras have been dropped quickly – a flop record is phased out in favour of a more experimental EP; anonymous one-off hits, like the aforementioned “Boom Clap” or the risible 2015 party girl anthem “Break the Rules”, are snipped out of tour setlists. But there’s always been a sense that she’s moved fast because, until Brat, no one asked her not to. When your career is largely a collection of “moments” only really tracked by a small army of devotees, it’s far easier to move onto the next thing. Brat forced Charli to stand still. The Moment gets its dramatic juice from the discomfort of it all.
The film takes place in the thick of Brat mania, and a lot of slightly on-the-nose comedy ensues. Charli’s viperous record label pushes her to launch a Brat credit card aimed at queer Gen-Zs, and she tangles with a filmmaker (played by Alexander Skarsgård) hired to direct a sanitised, family friendly documentary about her Brat tour for Amazon. He wants her to censor her lyrics and hand out light-up wrist bands to her fans. “Coldplay have been doing it for years,” he insists.
The more interesting stuff occurs whenever The Moment stops trying to be funny. Charli both embraces and comes to resent Brat’s success, and is pulled between her want for artistic integrity and the allure of completely selling out. She seems out of place, ill at ease. A judgy facialist laments Charli’s “stale energy” and how closed off she has become. I was struck by how often Charli allows herself to look completely burnt out – even for an artist whose uniform is generally a fag and a scowl. We see her slumped in the backs of limousines, miserable on hotel balconies, tired. There’s something howlingly awkward about a scene in which Charli – hair a mess, skin blotchy, vibe just so self-admonishingly British – runs into an eerily radiant Kylie Jenner at an Ibiza spa. “I don’t know if I belong here anymore,” Charli sings in the film at one point. “Snagged my tights out on the lawn chair.”
The best Charli xcx tracks – among them “Track 10”, “No Angel”, “Enemy”, “Girl So Confusing” and “Sympathy Is a Knife”, which seemed to scramble Taylor Swift’s brain last year – sit at the apex of mouthy bravado and needling self-loathing, and there’s a similar tension in her performance in The Moment. There’s a raw, instinctive quality to her acting, that is sometimes too loud and too much, and then completely immaculate. A late scene in the film, in which Charli pours out her feelings in a sad voice-note to her creative director Celeste (played by the charismatic actor and filmmaker Hailey Benton Gates), is incredibly affecting, and quiet and small in ways that suggest she has real potential as an actor. I kept being reminded of Nineties stalwarts like Rose McGowan or Fairuza Balk – those vaguely dangerous yet melancholy brunettes who are absolutely majestic when harnessed well by strong directors.
Towards the end of the Brat tour in 2025, there was a sense that Charli could do Charli xcx in her sleep – the tour was a smash, the reviews were exemplary, the strutting and the tobacco and the strappy white tops were de rigeur. Playing other people is a different beast. It’s more inconsistent, more prone to stumbles. It’s also, for all of us now watching, a tiny bit more interesting – here’s one of Britain’s finest exports taking a run at something radical, knowing full well she could fall flat on her face. What a power move.
‘The Moment’ is in cinemas
