The Charli XCX film is neither funny enough to be a mockumentary nor real enough to be a concert doc. The result is pure brand management.
Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Charli XCX’s pop persona is such a delectable blend of sincerity and pastiche that the idea of a mockumentary around her life is a no-brainer. The Moment’s opening salvo, a montage of news reports talking about the runaway success of the singer’s 2024 album Brat and the attendant pandemonium of “Brat Summer” coverage, shows the way. The spotlight on Charli is already so crazy that you theoretically only need to push everything a few small degrees to fully enter the realm of parody.
In practice, it turns out you need a little more than that. The Moment, directed by music-video wunderkind Aidan Zamiri, feels like a half-hearted hybrid of a real concert doc and a This Is Spinal Tap-like satire. It’s a little too afraid to go too far in either direction, and the end result is pure brand management. It follows Charli as she prepares for the start of her latest tour, all the while dealing with various sponsorships and media demands: a five second radio promo here, a credit card partnership and an absurdly tight outfit there. So long as the movie remains focused on this whirlpool of activity, it’s on fairly solid footing: The craze around Brat Summer really was quite something, and Zamiri compellingly conveys the chaos and confusion. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s comic invention.
But a note of tonal dissonance begins to creep in early on. Charlie’s record label wants to keep Brat Summer going – why shouldn’t this moment last a year or two or more? – and they’ve struck a deal with Amazon to make a concert documentary, directed by renowned and stupefyingly pretentious filmmaker Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård, making a fine meal of a one-note character), who speaks in New Age truisms and pretends at artistic integrity all the while pushing a bland, corporate-friendly vision of Charli’s aesthetic. In so doing, Johannes and his team begin to muscle out Charli’s longtime creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), a conflict the pop star’s hapless team of assistants doesn’t quite know how to handle.
The problem with The Moment is that it’s too afraid of its star. Charli is playing a version of herself in the film, but it’s not a cinematically interesting version: She’s confused and stressed by all the attention and the drama around her, sure, but that’s something we could have gotten from a straight documentary as well. So many of the people she runs into are objects of mockery – whether it’s the annoying Johannes, or her milquetoast manager (Jamie Demetriou), or a cut-throat record label chief (Roseanna Arquette), or an awkwardly fangirling make-up artist, or a particularly suicidal fan – that the gist of the movie seems to be that it’s really, really hard to be Charli XCX when everybody else around her is so insane or stupid. Which might even be true, but it is surely not the message The Moment intended to send.
There’s a way to make stuff like this work. Larry David did it for 25 years on HBO, portraying himself as both the voice of reason and a comically oblivious punchline on Curb Your Enthusiasm. But it takes some self-awareness and a willingness for self-ridicule. There are a few promising bits, mainly involving other celebrities playing themselves. Charli runs into Kylie Jenner at a particularly vulnerable moment, which leads to some poor decisions on her part, and the film briefly seems like it’s coming to life – but it’s just a minor stab at dimensionality. A late-breaking monologue from Charli about her lifelong desire to be cool and fit in doesn’t do the trick, either. In fact, it does the opposite, somehow turning this putative satire into a melodramatic miasma of self-justification.
Charli has always seemed quite savvy about her public image, so maybe the reason The Moment half-asses it is that nobody has fully thought the film through. They all just kind of want to make a Charli XCX movie but they don’t really want it to be like other musician docs. They want to have a bit of fun with it, which is after all her brand. But the point of a Christopher Guest-style satire isn’t that some people are on some level totally crazy — it’s that everybody is. And the point of a behind-the-scenes rock doc is that we’re getting something that feels like a true portrait of the artist. The Moment thinks it can have the best of both worlds, but it gives us neither.
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