Brat collapse mockumentary The Moment heralds the death of cool—and Charli xcx

Charli xcx plays a stylized version of herself in The Moment // Courtesy of A24

To be a Charli xcx fan is to always question if she’s being serious or not. 

In the late 2010s to early 2020s, she was penning lyrics like “aeroplane, you are so fly,” autographing douches at meet and greets, and publicly forgetting for whom, exactly, she writes her music. Okay, she’s taking the piss. 

In 2022, she released Crash, an unexpected embrace of mainstream pop that clashed with her reputation for experimental hyperpop. One Stranger Things collab and an NPR interview later, she declared: “I love selling out… Selling out creates pop culture.” She was probably joking, but there were times where the satire label did some pretty heavy lifting.  

Then came the release of Brat, an aggressively clubby yet vulnerable record that made it clear Charli was being unapologetically earnest. That is, until it spread so far beyond her (think: Kamala Harris) that whether Charli speaks for Brat or Brat speaks for Charli became a question of its own. 

With director Aidan Zamiri, Charli’s feature-length mockumentary The Moment directly addresses this question on a larger scale than she has before. 

It’s set at the peak of Brat‘s success and seemingly tries to square Charli’s artistic integrity with the era’s sudden commercial urgency. We slide into the fictional/heightened alternative Brat summer timeline where the movement seems destined for full collapse.

Charli works with spineless manager Tim (Jamie Demetriou) and creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates) to capitalize on…the moment… with preparations for a tour documentary. Meanwhile, soulless girlboss Tammy (Rosanna Arquette) and skeevy film director Johannes (Alexander Skårsgard)—a likely mirror of Sam Wrench, who’s behind the Eras tour documentary—lead her label’s capitalistic takeover.

It’s a trite entry to the pop girl conversation, sure. But Charli’s dissection of the era is sardonically self-aware, and it’s in the movie’s push and pull of extremes that we see Charli, real-life Charli, at her best—even if the fictionalized cool girl has to take the piss.

The Moment’s Charli is passive and moody, losing her cool with all that she has to do despite having time for none of it. She smokes on dark patios, expresses silent horror at the creative decisions around her, and throws in a few Black Swan diva down moments for good measure. One of those moments comes from a run-in with flawlessly composed Kylie Jenner at an Ibiza resort, after which Charli goes into a social media spiral that ultimately destroys the British economy. Even worse: (jumpscare warning) Anthony Fantano lowers his rating of the album, and Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign no longer associates with Brat green.

With the concert and documentary still underway, this is surely the end of everything. 

But watching her management’s meltdown contrasted to a fan wearing a “communist cum dump” shirt in Charli’s honor, you’ve got to wonder how much any of this still matters. 

It would be easy to insist that—yes—all of it still matters, that Brat belongs to Charli, what Charli says goes, and that she needs to fight back for Charli’s Version. Except, there’s a clear dread to everything she either makes happen or allows to make happen. That much, she understands.

All that’s left to take from Brat is the quickest way out.

Courtesy of A24

After seeing how Brat has melted into a mess of corporate nothingspeak, teens whose lives Charli saved, and other deeply unserious or maybe-kind-of serious mishaps, The Moment loses steam. At least Charli knows when to stop, regardless of whether she actually wants to. Not that anyone gets a payoff, though. Instead, you have one of the soundtrack’s only songs with words in it: a clumsy, eye-rolling millennial needledrop that’s so painfully on the nose, you realize Charli, much like her fictional self, is bullshitting.

For what it’s worth, the movie does well to capture The Moment for posterity, even if only in an aggrandized form. How else will we illustrate to future generations whatever possessed the general public in the summer of 2024?  

Brat is a coke baggie dressed as a sandwich bag. Brat is Kamala and commerce and Amazon. Brat is a treacherous mess and the butt of a one-hour, 43-minute long joke. So is Charli, and so are we. Heartbreak feels good in a place like this, and no Hell in man’s imagination can approximate the spiritual and creative implosion of an Eternal Brat Summer.