By the summer of 2024, “brat green” and lowercase text had become inescapable shorthand for Charli xcx’s commercial and cultural dominance. Rather than extending that momentum with a conventional concert documentary—tour buses, rehearsal footage, a climactic crowd shot—Charli and director Aidan Zamiri pivot The Moment toward a mockumentary that treats pop stardom as an operational problem as much as a creative one. The film satirizes the managerial layers, branding imperatives, and control mechanisms that accrue around a successful artist, framing fame less as a party than as a system that must be constantly serviced.
Before The Moment even gets going, it basically winks at the audience, opening with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it disclaimer noting that certain names and businesses have been altered for “licensing reasons.” This A24 mockumentary, with Charli playing a version of herself, may shuffle details and smooth over identifiers, but it circles a period of her life that was anything but fictional. This movie is impressive in what it recreates, even going as far as to stage a second “What’s In My Bag?” video with British Vogue, something Charli did in ernest, IRL.
The line between fiction and not is more than blurry in The Moment, so let's tow it.
The plot and industry machinery built around the brat arena tour in this universe is fictional, but the implications are the same. With The Moment, Charli implies that at the height of brat’s success, she was flooded with Eras Tour-level commercial opportunities that she had to weigh against the authenticity of her art.
In reality, there was no brat credit card or related financial scandal. There was no specific director that inspired Alexander Skarsgård’s Johannes. There was no concert film produced by Amazon Prime Video (thank god). All that is really real in The Moment is the album, its creator, Kylie Jenner, and Rachel Sennott. The character of Celeste, played by Hailey Benton Gates, is inspired by Charli’s IRL creative director Imogene Strauss, which makes Charli’s final voice memo monologue even more cutting. “In another world we made the show we wanted to,” she says as she releases her grip on brat.
Instead of a concert film, she turned brat into a conversation on creative control. She gave us a look at what could’ve happened, had we not agreed to leave the party. And leave the party we did. Charli xcx fans have laid brat to rest, leaning into a new kind of party as she prepares to debut the soundtrack album to Emerald Fennell's highly anticipated adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
The truth in this movie is in the eye of the beholder, and we're taking her word for it.
