MoviesMoviesThe 365 party girl features in three films this Sundance, none more prominent than ‘The Moment,’ which explicitly grapples with the end of Brat Summer as we know itGetty Images/Ringer illustrationBy A.A. DowdJan. 27, 11:30 am UTC • 7 min
It’s Friday night at the Sundance Film Festival, and all eyes are on Charli xcx. The hyperpop luminary has claimed the stage of the Eccles, the giant auditorium that serves as the fest’s most spacious venue (and hence where its splashiest selections invariably premiere). Charli is there to introduce The Moment, the sardonic new A24 mockumentary that casts her as a fictionalized, exaggeratedly difficult version of herself. “This movie is about the end of an era,” she tells the tightly packed audience in a brief introduction. And that era, as the movie eventually makes clear, is the one that rocketed the singer to a new level of fame, acclaim, and ubiquity back in the summer of 2024. She’s talking about the defining season of her career, and a bona fide cultural boom with its own font and slime-green palette. Yes, you heard it right, and right from the source: Brat Summer is finally winding down.
If this really is the last gasp of the movement Charli set into motion with her chart-topping sixth album, it’s ending with a bang, not a whimper. Because even here in the snowy mountains of Utah in the dead of winter, Brat Summer seems alive and well. Outside the Eccles, throngs of diehards have amassed to plead for a spare ticket or maybe just to catch a quick glimpse of their idol. Inside, the sea of onlookers facing the stage is dotted with beanies of fluorescent green—now and forever the hue of that bygone June when the pop star went supernova. If the hats don’t take you back, the ambient hum flooding the space might; it seems primed to explode into a club banger you banged on repeat an endless year and a half ago.
Even the Sundance logo is a little brat this year, and for good reason: If the festival has a star or even a mascot in 2026, it’s probably Charli. No fewer than three of the major premieres in Park City this past week featured the British sensation. She’s not just here with a starring role in The Moment. She also pops up in I Want Your Sex, the kinky new S&M comedy from Sundance legend Gregg Araki. And she logs a few more scenes in The Gallerist, the broad art-world satire from Birds of Prey director Cathy Yan.
Those seeking proof that Charli has the acting chops to match her stage presence may not find it at Sundance. None of her performances at the festival exhibit much range, exactly, though that’s hardly what she’s been tasked with offering in any of them. Rather, each trades cheekily on her up-all-night image, exaggerating or subverting it. I Want Your Sex does the latter, casting the 365 partygirl wildly against type as a total wet blanket, the disapproving girlfriend of Cooper Hoffman’s boy-toy hero. It’s in keeping with Araki’s puckish, punkish sense of humor that he’s secured the It Girl of our new pop era, only to have her play a buzzkill who spends her small handful of scenes tucked snugly in bed, a book under her nose. Admittedly, there is a fantasy scene where she rips off her top to reveal giant, Jessica Rabbit cartoon boobs.
Everyone is a cartoon in The Gallerist, including Charli’s character, a vapid influencer whose content-creator beau (Zach Galifianakis) ends up impaled on a sculpture (literally) and lucratively mistaken for edgy modern art. The pop star has even fewer scenes here (her total screentime is probably in the five-minute range), which is probably for the best, given how hard Yan’s movie flopped among the audience on Saturday night in the same massive theater. This version of Charli is more like an arch parody of shallow and upwardly mobile wannabe celebrities of the Instagram age. If The Gallerist is doing anything more than trotting her out like a status symbol (another big name to plaster alluringly on the poster), it’s offering Charli the opportunity to distinguish between her own brand of self-aware, debaucherous fame and the kind chased by her walking-punchline character. Oh, and maybe a chance to beat Taylor Swift at her own game with a vehicular slapstick injury to rival that hilarious viral death scene from Amsterdam.
I Want Your Sex and The Gallerist are glorified cameos—mere appetizers of the movie career Charli could have. The Moment, which debuted at Sundance one week ahead of its theatrical release this coming Friday, is the full meal, if not entirely nourishing. Though the format has predictably provoked Spinal Tap comparisons (“Spinal Brat,” someone quipped, vexing those of us who didn’t think of it first), there’s plenty of Smile 2 as well in the showbiz nightmare this Charli endures. The movie is set in autumn of 2024, in the immediate aftermath of Brat Summer, right as the star prepares to take her meteorically successful album on the road. It envisions the run-up to her first world arena tour as a series of headaches, compromises, and threats to her reputation: recording a needlessly complicated radio station promo; wedding Brat to the fortunes of a dying bank via a tacky credit card promotion; posing uncomfortably for a Vogue photo shoot.
As a comedy, The Moment is only intermittently funny. The best jokes revolve around Alexander Skarsgard as a visionless concert-film director who wants to flatten Charli’s abrasive stage production into a gaudy, bubblegum pop spectacle. But the movie gets a little too preoccupied with the conflict between this hack and the star’s (fictional) longtime creative director, Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), who begins to lose control of the production. Charli herself disappears for a stretch of the film, flitting off to Ibiza for a vacation from hell rather than face the mounting pressure to conform her brand to the label’s mainstream aspirations.
Of course, The Moment itself is a savvy act of brand management. It presents an alternate reality in which Charli sells out, partly to remind everyone that, hey, Charli didn’t sell out, even after Brat rocketed her out of what someone in the movie calls “niche appeal.” In that way, the film is a victory lap, celebrating her ability to be a superstar on her own terms by envisioning what it would look like if she lost herself in the rise. It’s also a winking companion piece to Brat itself, echoing the album’s delicate dance on the line between irony and sincerity.
In The Moment, Charli gets to have her cake and eat it, too. There’s nothing cooler, after all, than being willing to poke fun at yourself. Perpetually hiding beneath her signature shades, the “Charli xcx” we see in the film is an unflattering caricature: a sullen, insecure diva who abandons her principles and her closest collaborators out of fear of losing what she’s suddenly won. A true brat, pejorative, in other words. On stage after the premiere, Charli admitted that she could be a “volatile person” in real life, too—a comment that threw a frame of self-awareness over her performance. By copping to the possibility that there’s at least a little truth in The Moment’s depiction, she underlined the ways that she is not, in fact, the nightmare celebrity she plays in the movie. Nifty trick, that.
Director Aidan Zamiri is partially spoofing the confessional nature of tour-diary music documentaries, but The Moment also tempts us to see the truth in the joke. Brat is an albatross in the movie—she’s created a monster! Is Charli, as we see her here, worried that Brat will be over soon, or that it will never be over? That she’ll never be anything more than Brat? Like the album itself, The Moment blurs the line between irreverent and candid. Charli can wink at the notion that any of this bothers her by presenting the whole thing as just more performance art. (Not for nothing does Kylie Jenner, in a self-deprecating cameo, ask Charli if she’s “doing a Joaquin Phoenix thing.”) But she can also nudge us into wondering if all of this does eat at her.
That harmony of snark and vulnerability reaches a crescendo in the final scenes. It would be best not to spoil the movie’s priceless closing gag, but beneath the laughs, there’s the real sense that Charli is accepting and cheekily embracing the impermanence of Brat. This movement—a flashpoint for fashion, design, and music—got so big that she no longer has any control over it. So it’s time to move on. The Moment feels like a deliberate attempt to wipe the slate clean, to put Brat behind her, in preparation for the next reinvention. And that feeling spilled off the screen and into a festival that found the singer trying some new outfits on for size: Charli the autocritic, Charli the ensemble player, Charli the prankster.
After the movie, she returns to the stage for a vaguely awkward Q&A, fielding questions alongside her politely present castmates. Eugene Hernandez, director of the festival, asks her what era she’s in now. “Sorry, what do you mean?” Charli replies. It’s like a moment right out of The Moment—a live extension of the film’s cringe comic portrait of promotional humiliations. But if Charli’s answer is a dodge, maybe there’s some truth in it, too. Brat Summer is over. She can take a minute to decide what season comes next.
A.A. Dowd
A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor based in Chicago. His work has appeared in such publications as The A.V. Club, Vulture, and Rolling Stone. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
