‘The Moment’ Review: Charli XCX Asks If That’s All There Is to a Brat Summer, and in a Mostly Shallow Satirical Flex

What happens when Brat Summer — that slime-green cultural phenomenon in which Charli XCX dared us to all be much messier, much less apologetic, to send that first text and not regret it — really ends? What is astronomically lost in the supernova of when fame and art collide? And is there such a thing as metaphorical cocaine?

These are a few of the trenchant asks that come up in Aidan Zamiri’s mockumentary celebrity portrait and mostly shallow satirical flex “The Moment,” co-written by Zamiri with Bertie Brandes and Charli XCX. It stars Charli as a funhouse-mirror version of herself staring into the future void, in the fortnight before her Brat world tour, prodding at her own celebrity skin and reading her album cycle’s elegy before it’s even been born. As much as the movie feels like it’s for the diehards only, “The Moment” takes the Brat out of Charli to sketch a stripped-down version of the pop star in doubt of herself.

Splicing Rob Reiner’s mock-rock-that-started-them-all “This Is Spinal Tap” with John Cassevetes’ wounded stage-actress portrait  “Opening Night” — both films Charli XCX surely has rated on her personal Letterboxd account, which has accounted for a sizable chunk of upstart Gen Z cinephiles — “The Moment” features a screen-commanding performance by the generational icon. It’s surely her best work in a scripted project yet, eschewing caricature even as incessant puffs of Parliaments and the lispy (however geographically accurate) pronunciation of “Ibiza” wink at a very extra, outré version of a late-millennial celebrity. Charli plays herself as a mass of fraying nerves who can also be just a tad incorrigible toward her staff as she skids out over what to do when her tour is over.

The ‘90s-nostalgic director Zamiri has honed an eye for rich-contrast, patent-leather-clad music videos for the likes of Charli herself and Billie Eilish, but the grit and glamor of “The Moment’s” visual imagination belong to cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who brings that Mean Streets of New York cinematic style to what is otherwise a fairly rote faux-doc about a pop star. It’s a mockumentary framework that doesn’t inherently suit the film’s core. A fourth-wall-breaking moment in which Charli cuts lines of coke, only for Rachel Sennott playing herself to turn to the camera and tell it to “delete this,” is a jolting reminder that we’re in a mockumentary at all, something we almost forgot given the film’s fluid pacing and unadorned style (besides those flashing title cards that double as epilepsy warnings). “The Moment” is at its best when Zamiri and Charli XCX let the film tell its own story without calling attention to its form, or piling on the name-checks that might make some folks feel left out of the party.

In “The Moment,” Charli is not the only person trying to keep Brat summer going. There’s her record label executive — played by an unforgiving Rosanna Arquette, lacquered on top of being weathered — and the assistants beneath her who are so disconnected they barely know who Michael Jordan is. Meanwhile, the crew runners and others who work for Charli mostly tell her what she wants to hear even as she has no idea what that is.

‘The Moment’A24

There’s her muscle-circuit-gay social media manager (Isaac Powell) who needs more content to post, especially around an upcoming Brat credit card and savings bank aimed at queer creators (“How do you prove they’re gay?” Charli asks; this bit gets a laugh). There’s her creative director, Celeste (filmmaker/actress Hailey Benton Gates), Charli’s friend and the only one with a foot in reality, but with no other purpose in life but to subjugate herself to her employer. Meanwhile, a stylist has had to cancel his own honeymoon due to delays in the tour, indicating both slavish, life-altering devotion to the British pop star in her coterie, but also her obliviousness to such things going on.

These largely directionless characters and more whirl in and around “The Moment” as a kind of I Spy of the internet famous. This face sheet in motion starts to make the movie feel like it’s intended for that audience only, a private time capsule accessible only to those who come to the film as Charli’s +1s, or those fans with a deep investment in her cosmopolitan social (media) life. Which, to be fair, is a lot of people.

Underused is the almost never-earnest comedian Kate Berlant as a futzy makeup technician who says to Charli, “Tell me you’re not drinking water again!” when her client is bordering on unwell in the chair.

Chewing first the edges of the scenery and then swallowing the screen whole is the increasingly unimpeachable Alexander Skarsgård as “100 percent African” music video director Johannes, whom the label sends in to inject new creative into Brat tour rehearsals. Like a certain vainglorious fintech pro he played on “Succession,” Johannes sees only four dancing quadrants on the brain and a commitment to sanding down the Brat aesthetic into the most accessible package possible, complete with Katy Perry-style suspension cables that whip Charli off the Dagenham rehearsal stage floor to throw platitudes like flower petals onto her adoring, shrieking public.

The end-of-an-era vibes are real even as the era hasn’t really started — we’re only at the top of a summer tour, after all — and Charli is really coming unglued, drinking more, smoking more, pacing more. You can tell the singer/star’s admiration for a cinematic woman on the verge, and she ably embodies an agent of her own chaos even as “The Moment” increasingly offers her only a more conventional envelope to contain it. The film is clever in spurts but too long as a whole; recall “This Is Spinal Tap” was a fat-free 82 minutes, whereas “The Moment” has a more wandering vérité eye.

 “You’re not going to die after an album cycle,” one of Charli’s posse tells her. Is she not? An impromptu trip to Ibitha only dilutes her sense of self further, careening “The Moment” into body-horror terrain. That sequence also introduces a placidly smiley Kylie Jenner playing herself on seemingly a Valium-Adderall speedball of deluded bounciness. And with a scornful undercurrent at the fact that Charli apparently stole Johannes out from under her. “You’ve gotta level up,” she tells Charli. Unfortunately, in the movie’s rushed last act, which is also languorous in the wrong places, “The Moment” doesn’t level up so much as crest downward like a bird dropped dead in the sky (or from the ceiling of a rehearsal space) mid-flight.

There’s a cynical, grimly funny visual joke that caps the film as its final shot, though audiences might find it frustrating that the film neither endorses nor criticizes the late-stage capitalistic inevitabilities it throws at the wall. Is this Charli, the Charli of “The Moment,” a product of the fame machine or a product of her own self-exploding neurosis, fueled by a creativity that was taken away from her? (She did, after all, make the “brat” album on her own terms.) Charli’s version of herself, though, is a fascinating creation — self-deprecating, yes, and laughing at herself, but with the clinical distance of a telescope lasered onto a forming star. See this movie with a crowd of Charli’s friends and collaborators, and you’ll too be in on the joke.

Grade: C+

“The Moment” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. A24 releases the film on January 30.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.