Charli XCX plays herself in The Moment, which premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. The mockumentary about the end of her Brat Summer phenomenon lacks clarity and humor.
They hire director Johannes (Alexander Skarsgard) who wants to sanitize Charli's edge. At the same time the label ropes her into a promotion for a Brat themed credit card.
Some of this is absurd, like the credit card. Creative differences and art vs. commerce are relevant but The Moment has no observations about them or suggestions with how to effectively deal with them.
Charli XCX, who brought the story to director Aidan Zamiri, had something personal to express. She's not sending herself up so much as working through what if 2024 really went this way.
It is surprising she'd want to present herself as this indecisive, rolling over to executives and making compromises. Wanting to show her vulnerability is more understandable, but a voicemail confessional intended to reveal her insecurity only confuses her motivation further.So it's not really satire. It's just chaos. For a non-Brat outsider, little seems uniquely Charli XCX.
The movie is full of stereotypical entertainment industry characters but they don't combine for funny or clever scenes. Her manager Tim (Jamie Demetriou) is always distracted on his phone.
His suggestions are never absurd enough to be punchlines. They're all generic.
To show how obtuse the label exec (Rosanna Arquette) is, one junior says he's ready to start yesterday and she responds, "Well, that's impossible." That expression has been around at least 30 years so should not surprise anyone.
Charli's creative director, Celeste (Hailey Gates) has her back, but Charli sets her up to fail. Perhaps that's also true of talent under pressure but Celeste is really just there to react to the other absurd caricatures.
Rachel Sennott plays herself in scene where they argue about her role in a music video and do drugs. Kylie Jenner also gives Charli career advice it does not seem like a successful artist would follow, yet the film plays it as if the advice lands.
Even fan encounters are bizarrely impersonal. One fan shares that her music saved his life when he was suicidal but the film presents it as something unusual, as if fans don't share personal connections with artists all the time.
On-screen text is aggressively jerky, strobing different font styles for the same letters. Even end titles jitter up the screen, taunting audiences as they leave.
Tellingly, key scenes do not include proper coverage of the scene. Charli is bundled up, shot from behind as she's reacting to a significant conflict with Celeste. There's no stylistic advantage to mistreating her.
Whenever snippets of Charli XCX songs play, they are a relief from A.G. Cook's aggressive industrial score. Her songs are intense too, so that's the point of comparison.
And yet there is surprisingly scant Charli XCX music. "Bittersweet Symphony" by The Verve plays longer in the film than any of her songs.
Maybe in 2024 a movie about the Brat phenomenon seemed relevant. The good news is that two years later, no movie is needed to move on from Brat.
A24 will release The Moment Jan. 30.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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