Beg for You
By Kyle Turner
The Moment
Dir. Aidan Zamiri, U.S., A24
Before The Moment really starts, an aggressive and blinding strobe montage of the movie’s partnerships and co-producers floods the screen. The half dozen or so brands, including Beats, Aperol, and Charli’s record label Atlantic Records, flash for a second, but indicate nonetheless that the once “niche” (per one Atlantic rep Jamie played by Rish Shah) dance pop princess has ascended to a throne as part of a modern music empire sustained by endorsements, deals, and sponcon.
A mockumentary built around an alternate universe version of Charli XCX’s brat world tour, The Moment is, to some degree, in on the joke of its own passé nature. A brat movie? Now? The film’s timeline exists after the Sweat tour she co-headlined with Australian pop twink Troye Sivan, which ended in October 2024, and before her solo tour, which kicked off in November and played its final show in August 2025. Thus, the film takes place in the middle of a 13-month-long season of brat, already teetering into oversaturation. Laced throughout the film are questions, opinions, and aspirations about brat’s longevity as a pop culture artifact turned phenomenon. On one side, there’s the music label’s fussy need for infinite brat, embodied by an amusingly haughty Rosanna Arquette and the concert film director Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), who, through cutesy deferential corporate speak, hijacks the concert to make a bastardized (brat-stardized?) family friendly-ish version of the performance. On the other, we have Charli’s long-suffering yes people: creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), her manager Tim (Jamie Demetriou), and gay hanger-on Lloyd (Isaac Powell). Only Celeste ever chimes in with honest feedback and wisdom about the short life cycles of albums. But the combination of pressure from the label and fan expectation pushes this fictionalized Charli to march onwards, even at the expense of the album’s novelty and her own grace in the public eye.
Well, grace might not be the word. The Moment necessarily capitalizes on Charli’s persona as 365 party girl. An interview with Stephen Colbert has the late-night host joking about both brat’s viability past summertime and her drug habits (“Have you ever snorted a line of pumpkin spice?” he asks her, cheekily). And in a later scene depicting lighting cues being made for an interlude in the concert, Johannes’s creative input (vying for a bigger, family-oriented crowd) is rebuffed after Celeste retorts drolly, “She’s singing about cocaine.” Beyond the specifics of doing a line in the bathroom while passive-aggressively making chit-chat with Rachel Sennott, The Moment’s most compelling throughline is that maybe it was absurd for brat to skyrocket in the first place, particularly in an entertainment ecosystem that requires its celebrities to be as mass market, palatable, likeable, and as ready and willing to sell out (without selling out) as possible.
The Cambridge-born musician had been cutting her teeth on PC music and hyperpop experiments for much of her career. That she was seldom directly in the spotlight contributed to a cool girl mystique; the aloofness and nonchalance that made her the Hot Internet Girl also made her conveniently answerable to no one. Although her 2022 album Crash raised her profile, prior to brat’s June 2024 release Charli XCX was not really famous enough to worry about her public persona, content with being the chic, sunglasses-sporting night club dweller.
The real Charli appears to be using the fictionalized Charli to own her uncoolness. The movie is coming out long after brat summer has withered away, and the “Charli” at the center of the film is frazzled, overwhelmed, and burnt out. Nevertheless, she persists. A Vogue shoot here, a partnership with a bank called Howard Stirling for a brat-themed credit card there, and a sponsored trip to Ibiza in the middle of a three-week rehearsal for the tour. Throughout the film, Charli is surrounded by marketing and consultant types, who do not understand her or brat. With so many voices in the room, Charli drowns in the din of confusion over what her appeal as an artist is and what brat’s allure is. There is only a bottom line. (Not of cocaine, mind you.) And this quasi-fictionalized version of Charli is fine with that!
The Moment’s dissonance between “Charli”’s general disdainful attitude and her willingness to entertain creative intervention from the label and Johannes makes for an intermittently amusing parody of pop fame in an entertainment landscape that is more and more predicated on the merging of fandom and corporate synergy. She is beleaguered by all the decisions she must make, previously used to being alone and doing her own thing, but under duress she says yes to everything. The precarity that drives these decisions to cede creative control is lightly referenced in the form of speedy montages of internet videos, posts, and news clips. (A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from Pitchfork’s article “Brat Summer Is Dead, Long Live Brat Summer” is anachronistically placed during the film’s crescendo [the film takes place in September 2024, but the piece was published in July].) And a broader feeling of unease is amplified by Sean Price Williams’s paranoid long zooms and voyeuristic shots from outside meeting rooms or a discreet corner of the rehearsal venue. If, as the film suggests, the world is watching, perhaps waiting, for Charli to do something uncool, off-brand, or, god forbid, unfashionable, why does The Moment feel, at best, like a pleasant, unserious, diversion?
Director Aidan Zamiri, who helmed Charlotte Atchison’s videos for “Guess” and “360” and is credited as a co-writer with Bertie Brandes, appears most skilled at creating an environment in which the mockumentary crew is no more or less obnoxious or obtrusive than the other hounds clamoring for her attention. And while certain tics and jittery shot/reverse shot sequencing in the editing imply a farcical aspiration and tempo akin to Spring Breakers (relentless, morbidly funny), Zamiri can’t find a way to get beyond the mildly absurdist humor of being around famous people who are themselves surrounded by a mix of lackeys and execs.
The film already suggests that the concert film endeavor is a bit of an afterthought, that the show is set, and all other non-tour-related promotion is the result of being strong-armed. Even as the mangled communication between creative teams is intended to amplify the scale and dramatic stakes, as well as paint a singer chewed up in the machinery of stardom, The Moment doesn’t get absurd enough. These are passable foibles for an episode of Extras or Call My Agent!, but despite the reminder that Charli is about to embark on a world tour, the film never rises to the feeling of risk and anxiety that comes with that kind of global notoriety.
The Moment aspires to sit alongside other music mockumentaries and experiments with fame such as This Is Spinal Tap and I’m Still Here (Joaquin Phoenix is name-checked in a bathroom bump scene), and its conception of the music business as a confederacy of dunces splashed with stardom is adequate. But as a peek-behind-the-curtain, it stands in sharp relief compared to Beyoncé’s Renaissance concert film and Taylor Swift: The End of an Era, in that there is no attempt on the part of the pop star protagonist to seem as if she’s enjoying any part of the process. The Moment seeks to capture/satirize the (romanticized) flashpoint in the star’s career when she transformed from artist to product, and the contrast between Charli leaning into mania, indecision, and sometimes infantile behavior and the feverishness with which brands want to sell that image is theoretically clever.
But The Moment frankly doesn’t get unhinged or demented enough. Though there is little unique about filming a famous person’s histrionics, even if they’re artificial, tantrums from the rich and famous are delicious schadenfreude material, or prompts to interrogate said celebrity’s authenticity. Charli’s aware of this component (ever the cinephile, Charli cites Cassavetes’s Opening Night as an influence) and of the mercurial way that behavior gets channeled into someone’s final work. But her affect of annoyance doesn’t do quite enough to buttress the stakes. A little bratty, sure, but it’s not like she’s throwing wine in people’s faces. Meanwhile, her tour is being subsumed by someone we’re told is a weirdo hack and her brand partnerships are about to combust, yet besides its handful of chuckles, the film struggles to sustain real drama. Charli’s performance isn’t bad per se, but disaffected schtick tends to flatten her crisis of self, sapping its urgency.
There’s surprisingly little of Charli performing music in the film, which makes the desired contrast and negotiation between “the artist as independent being” and “the artist as product” fuzzier and less shrewd. It’s occasionally compelling to watch someone clearly not adjusting to being the center of attention from fans and suits alike, and the nonsense language of both deference and subtle aggression that leads to miscommunication and mishap makes for some fun scenes (“What is metaphorical cocaine?”). Now Charli is parlaying her prolonged brat time into featured turns in movies like Erupcja, 1000 Nights a Hero, and Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, as well as a soundtrack crafted for Emerald Fennell’s take on “Wuthering Heights.” Yet The Moment, which is allegedly poised to show both the growing pains and the undeniable magnetism of Charli XCX the Star—even if it’s a half joke that implies she did not escape with her integrity entirely intact—wavers at both. Ironically, The Moment is not unlike her vice of choice: bracing and fun for five to ten minutes, but unsatisfying if you’re disinclined to make a habit out of it.