The Moment unfolds as a self-aware satire of contemporary pop success, following a semi-fictionalized Charli xcx as she prepares to launch her first headline arena tour in the wake of the breakout cultural moment surrounding her 2024 album brat.
The A24 mockumentary, co-written by Charli and helmed by “360” video director Aidan Zamiri, adopts a documentary-style lens. We’ve seen this many times before. Most recently, via Taylor Swift: The End of an Era. Charli’s version, however, spins a satire.
The album, concept, and star are real, but nothing else is. Rosanna Arquette, Alexander Skarsgård, and Jamie Demetriou play fictionalized industry executives and brand partners, fighting to shape the narrative and commercial prospects of her career. For Skarsgård part, he plays an insufferable director attached to film the tour for the record company. His vision includes LED lights reading “BITC#” and Charli dancing among giant lighters and cigarettes. He is beefing with Charli’s creative partner Celeste, and essentially making brat very uncool.
The film keeps jolting her from one kind of crisis to another, never long enough to process any of them. But the one that brings her down is the green brat credit card, created by the fictional Howard-Stirling bank and marketed with free tickets to the brat tour.
To trace the ending, let’s start in Ibiza.
Charli checks into a wellness resort in Ibiza, completely free in exchange for an Instagram post. Her decision to take the trip is made in duress, and she arrives with frantic energy as her tour threatens to fall apart two weeks before its debut.
After an ego death with a foreboding facialist, Charli runs into Kylie Jenner who reminds her, “The second you think people are getting sick of you, you have to go harder.” Is that the point? Is that what we’re all doing here?
A frantic Charli paces around her lavish room, crushes a wine glass in her hand, and starts frantically posting a scattered promotion for the Howard-Stirling brat credit card to her fans. The situation goes full financial crisis. Charli becomes a punchline on the same late night talk shows she used to promote the album in the first place, and must essentially surrender to the powers at be and relinquish creative control.
Charli goes MIA and there’s a strange moment where the suits wonder if she’s died, and if that would actually be a best case scenario. Nothing comes of that thread, don’t let it distract you.
In the end, Charli gives up the fight on all fronts and releases brat into the ether. The ether, in this case, is just capitalism. The final shots of the movie skewer the commercialization of music, ending on a loud, bright advertisement for the deeply uncool Brat Live! on Amazon Prime Video. The promotion is not unlike many we’ve seen from the major pop girls of yore. And you thought Taylor Swift’s “Actually Romantic” was pointed...
