To understand “The Moment,” the new mockumentary from Charli XCX and director Aidan Zamiri, it’s instructive to understand what the movie isn’t. It’s not a hagiographic celebration of her artistry and music at all — in fact, almost none of her songs actually appear in the movie.
It wouldn’t have been unexpected if XCX had used the film as a victory lap, reminding the audience of the cultural and critical dominance that she enjoyed following the release of her acclaimed 2024 hit record “BRAT.” Instead, XCX seems to scoff at the very idea of a victory lap, resisting easy classification and neat narratives as she always has.
From the outside, it seemed like XCX had finally achieved her goal of uniting the underground and the mainstream with “BRAT” — critics argued that mass audiences had finally caught up with the strange and innovative textures and techniques that she’d been incorporating into her music since 2016, framing the success of “BRAT” as the culmination of what Ruby Carter calls “Charli 2.0.”
On the inside, “The Moment” suggests that things weren’t that simple or that triumphant. The movie begins as XCX is preparing for the arena tour supporting “BRAT,” her first headlining arena shows. The film’s early sequences are fairly realistic, as XCX coordinates with her team and her record label in a seemingly endless series of meetings about making the proverbial “Brat Summer” last forever. They’re often funny, and all the actors are more than capable.
XCX is a standout in the film’s cast, playing herself in a manner that feels true-to-life, but also fits naturally within the cinematic world she and Zamiri have created. It’s difficult enough to play a fictionalized version of yourself, and it becomes even more complex when you’re doing so in an attempt to deconstruct your persona, but she does it well.
The aforementioned deconstruction comes into play in full force as the movie’s plot progresses. The structure isn’t exactly novel: a left-field artist creates an unexpectedly massive hit, the powers that be attempt to monetize and control the artist with no understanding of what made the work special in the first place, the artist fights back and so on. What makes this particular take on the trope interesting is the way that XCX weaves in specific details from her nearly 20-year-long career.
As I mentioned, there’s not very much music in this movie. XCX’s references to her body of work are mostly verbal or visual, and they never feel indulgent. It’s not the cryptological fan-service of a Taylor Swift album rollout; instead, XCX interpolates iconography from throughout her career to externalize her feelings about her identity as an artist.
One particularly memorable scene borrows from the striking, bloodstained “CRASH” album cover, a record that XCX has described as her “sell-out” project. On the other end of the spectrum, a later sequence references the photography for “how i’m feeling now,” arguably her most personal record. She almost exclusively references her most personal and most impersonal work, with little in between.
Her collaborations with artists like SOPHIE and Lorde are absent, and the only “BRAT” songs she performs are a subdued “I might say something stupid” and a fragmented “Sympathy is a knife” — two of the most lyrically vulnerable and self-critical tracks on the album. To the best of my recollection, the only songs from her back catalog that are mentioned at all are fan-favorite emotional self-autopsy “Track 10” and her first top-10 hit “Boom Clap,” a song that she’s all but disavowed of late.
The most important uses of music in the movie are its last two, which I think are the twin keys to understanding “The Moment” and where it fits into the Charli XCX project as a whole. The film ends with a parodic trailer for XCX’s fictional “BRAT Live!” concert movie, a garish and sanitized spectacle that recalls countless recent tour films. It could be read as a good-hearted but biting dig at Swift. Instead of being soundtracked with an XCX song, the footage is overlaid with The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony.”
The track was in fact XCX’s pre-show song on her “BRAT” arena tour, and its lyrics correspond to her feelings of uncertainty and marginalization, but its inclusion goes deeper than that. Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft, the song’s writer, was forced to relinquish his songwriting credit after a spurious lawsuit by The Rolling Stones’ management accused him of copying an obscure Mick Jagger vocal melody.
The track was torn from its original writer’s hands and stripped of its personal context, licensed endlessly for advertisements. Ashcroft, who had forfeited all royalties, only received $1,000 for writing one of the most enduring pop hits of the ‘90s. When laid over the gauche concert footage, it feels like a warning from XCX to herself.
This seems like a pessimistic, if funny, ending, but the movie’s end credits complicate it somewhat. The closing credits are uncompromising, visually blasting the viewer with strobing lights of the type that the record execs in the film fear will alienate audiences. These eye-watering visuals are sonically matched with “Dread,” a version of XCX’s first big songwriting success, “I Love It,” reworked by her regular collaborator A.G. Cook.
“I Love It” is like a bizarro version of “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” Charli handed the song off to Swedish pop duo Icona Pop, but they retained some of her vocals and afforded her songwriting credit. The song launched her career, and she retains the rights to do whatever she wants with it, whether that’s using it as a triumphant closer to a Glastonbury Festival headline set or remixing it into a wall of dissonant noise.
“The Moment,” ultimately, is a reminder of the worst-case scenario for an artist like Charli XCX, but also feels like a sigh of relief that said scenario hasn’t come to pass.
