Moments in pop music come and go, but none in recent memory have been eulogized quite like brat summer. Within a year, the promotional tail for Charli XCX’s monumental 2024 album had grown long enough to wrap around her own neck. Brat wasn’t just an era, it was a machine with its own quiet economy, painting the town green and apple-dancing to the bank. Still, the Essex girl is no Boring Barbie. Charli was quick to take scissors to her own evolving phenomenon: she ripped brat banners from the rafters on a 2025 global tour; at Glastonbury, she set one ablaze. But, of course, moments as lucrative as brat summer don’t die so easily.
The Moment, a semifictional mockumentary Charli XCX conceived with “360” director Aidan Zamiri, is a document of the undead. In the spirit of Spice World, Charli plays herself in the heat of brat summer, watching her salad days wilt as the fame she’d chased her whole life spirals beyond her control. It’s 2024: brat’s success has been certified (platinum, in fact), and Charli’s inner circle consists of a series of yes-men and sycophants, handlers and hangers-on, all haggling for a slice of the pie. Board rooms huddle on how to best keep the brat engine going, and a value-maxing exec played to Big Four perfection by Rosanna Arquette sees dollar signs in a concert movie — and, disastrously, a brat-green credit card aimed at LGBTQ+ twentysomethings. When Charli asks, incredulously, whether you have to be gay to apply for the card, her manager breaks out in a sweat.
The real-life Charli XCX is a singularly dedicated musician within the sphere of global pop sensations; she’s equally committed to her hyper-online public persona. Charli is plugged in to the degree that The Moment’s b-roll is littered with clips, real and doctored, of brat summer’s saturation of everything from CNN and Stephen Colbert to Anthony Fantano and r/Fauxmoi. It’s difficult to imagine someone so self-aware erring to the degree of endorsing an identity-based bank loan. To that end, The Moment is an exercise in sliding doors of mismanaged integrity. The fictionalized Charli is admirably self-effacing, prone to backstage meltdowns and chain-smoking sessions that choke her employees in the backs of limos. But every concession comes with a wink underwritten by giving the movie’s subject the final cut: you know the real Charli would never be so cringe as to ride a giant Bic lighter at one of her shows, right? Right?
The Moment’s promo tour has touted the movie’s searing vulnerability, but the dissonance between the hyperliterate Charli we’ve come to know and the one losing her grip on screen challenges how much the real Charli actually wants us to see. Arquette and her suits hire Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), a South African expat with the tendencies of your least favorite barista, to direct the brat concert movie. He quickly proves that he may have been a better fit for a band like The Lumineers, pushing back against Charli’s rails-in-the-bathroom aesthetics in favor of light-up bracelets. It’s hard to square the singer’s well-publicized cinephilia with the idea of collaborating with a director who pulls inspiration from Coldplay concerts. That might seem like a petty gripe if The Moment’s inventions had otherwise managed — or at least aspired — to peel back Charli’s persona, but the blurred lines between message, medium, and moment read less as provocation than protection.
During a 2025 Coachella set amid brat’s funeral tour, Charli XCX suggested it’s time for a new type of summer before strobing the names of a flurry of Letterboxd-chic auteurs: David Cronenberg, Ari Aster, and Celine Song, all enjoying their 15 seconds of summer in brat’s limelight. Among the names projected was Sean Price Williams, the Dimes Square DP du jour who serves both as The Moment’s own cinematographer and a major lever to elevate a movie that might otherwise have gone straight to streaming. Zamiri’s debut feature operates like a tonally motion sick Christopher Guest flick; its jokes sputter and stall and seem to work in contempt with any sense of emotional catharsis or insight. But it looks fantastic. The gritty pedigree Williams built through dirtbag staples like Good Time and Her Smell proves a perfect match for The Moment’s four-on-the-floor sensibilities, which keep the epileptic mania of Gaspar Noé as a North Star. And, for his part, Zamiri’s music video CV informs a well-paced and punchy movie that never overstays its welcome. It’s just hard not to wish he and cowriter Bertie Brand took another pass at the screenplay.
Part of what made brat summer remarkable was to watch an uncompromising album careen toward what’s left of the monoculture without playing to the lowest common denominator. Pop monoliths like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter are often bound to aesthetic dogmas that prohibit outré choices like collaborating with SOPHIE and penning songs about Dasha Nekrasova. Brat took a subculture into broad daylight before it could lick the coke off its gums, and even the odd misstep in its wake couldn’t shake its indelible cool. The Moment is a fine vehicle for a pop star and a welcome alternative to a perfunctory concert film, but nothing in Charli’s ascendency has come so close to feeling merely competent. Maybe brat summer is over after all.
DIRECTOR: Aidan Zamiri; CAST: Charli XCX, Alexander Skarsgård, Rachel Sennott, Rosanna Arquette; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: January 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 43 min.
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