Charli XCX's "The Moment" & The Desire To Be Remembered
This started as a review of Charli XCX's new film "The Moment." It's still kind of that, but not really.
Few rises to pop stardom have been more unconventional than that of Charli XCX. When she first made waves in the music industry, it came over a decade ago, with the one-two punch of her song “Boom Clap” and a feature on Iggy Azalea’s super-smash hit “Fancy,” one of the most obnoxious singles of the 2010s.
In the years that followed, Charli opted to completely forgo superstardom, instead coming out with some of the most forward-thinking pop music of the last quarter-century, albeit pop music that suffered from not actually being popular among the masses. There was a tongue-in-cheek attempt at “selling out” with 2022’s Crash, with its more suggestive album artwork and radio-ready singles, and then a more blatant breakthrough, though not entirely intentionally at first, with the release of 2024’s Brat.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with “Brat Summer,” but if not, I will try to explain it as efficiently as possible. A couple of weeks before the album’s release, a wall in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was painted lime green with the album’s title in lowercase black Arial font. When the album was released, the wall periodically got repainted with updated messages, including the announcement of the album’s first deluxe edition. It was an effective bit of marketing, and when the wall went back to normal, Charli “mourned” the loss in a tweet that amassed nearly 100,000 likes.
The simplicity of the album cover, combined with the frequently updated wall, led to some masterful viral marketing. Charli and Atlantic Records capitalized by releasing the “Brat Generator,” which allowed for regular people and companies alike to add their own custom text in place of the title.
Additionally, a TikTok dance to “Apple,” one of the standouts from the album, went viral as well, with everyone and their mother (literally, in many cases) posting their version. When Charli went on tour, it became tradition for the camera to focus on someone in the crowd dancing during the song, whether a random fan or one of her celebrity friends.
Eventually, Brat Summer reached politics when Charli referred to then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris as “Brat,” prompting the Harris campaign to embrace the distinction in an effort to cater to young voters. Unfortunately, we all know what happened next. But I digress.
Brat Summer was the big break that Charli had not necessarily been actively chasing but was also not against happening. Here she was, going from a mid-level pop artist to someone who could comfortably say she sold out both Madison Square Garden and the O2 Arena. Despite her best efforts at presenting as cool, Charli is someone who has always worn her emotions on her sleeve, and it became clear that, as successful as she had been in 2024 and 2025, she was terrified of seeing it end. This finally gets us to The Moment, the new mockumentary film directed by Aidan Zamiri (in his film directorial debut) and starring Charli herself.
The film itself is easy to follow, but I am also going to spoil the entire plot in these next few paragraphs. If you do want to watch it, look away.
Brat Summer is coming to an end, and Charli is preparing for her first arena tour. She and her team have to continue promoting the album because Atlantic Records wants them to, but they view it as “cringe.” Atlantic has several ways of doing this, including collaborating with fictional bank Howard Stirling to create the “Brat Card,” a lime green credit card that they believe will draw fans to start banking with them. It’s clear very early on that this is going to be an extreme version of what could have happened if Charli had gone all in on selling out.
Before rehearsals for the tour start, Charli’s team brings in Johannes Godwin (played by Alexander Skarsgård), a pretty middling director known for his critically acclaimed but formulaic concert movies. Godwin hates the seedy club aesthetic and wants to turn the tour into a family-friendly affair. Charli and creative director Celeste remind him that she sings about cocaine.
Charli leaves for Ibiza for a couple of days to get away from the stress of tour prep, which leads to mounting tensions between Celeste and Godwin. She has a negative interaction with a masseuse who tells her to drop everything and have a child. She also runs into Kylie Jenner, who tells her to squeeze everything she can out of her mainstream breakthrough. Charli has a breakdown, argues with her staff, accepts Godwin’s vision (which causes her and Celeste to fall out), and haphazardly promotes the credit card. The promotion with the bank meant that fans could purchase concert tickets early. However, as soon as fans made the purchase, they defaulted on their payments. Obviously, that is fraud.
The scandal causes Howard Stirling to file for bankruptcy and also helps speed up the end of Brat Summer. Shortly before the concert movie is filmed, Charli sends Celeste a three-minute voicemail apologizing to her for not sticking up for their original vision, adding that she wanted the Brat era to end as quickly as possible, even with her intense desire to be liked by everyone and the fame the run brought her.
The film ends with an advertisement for the concert, as directed by Johannes Godwin, and a series of rave reviews. But in the film’s final shots, she’s visibly going through the motions, a completely sanitized version of herself performing for a crowd that isn’t hers.
Of course, The Moment is an alternate reality film, a look at what the Brat era may have turned into had she listened to the wrong executive or decided against fighting for her ideas. But there is still a lot of sincerity here. Brat itself tackles several topics, including Charli’s own feelings regarding her inability to reach the upper echelon of pop stardom despite early-career success and a dedicated legion of fans. A recurring idea on the accompanying tour, especially as it stretched into 2025, was the understanding that moments like the one she experienced don’t last forever; hence, the symbolic flag burning at Glastonbury last July.
I loved the Brat album but could not stand the phenomenon around it. Especially once politicians used it to score “cool points” with potential young voters. The conversation moved too far away from the music, which was frustrating as someone who believes it to be among the best pop releases of the entire 2020s. That being said, if I were in Charli’s position, I would completely understand being so openly scared of the era coming to an end. You never know if you’re going to be able to recapture that feeling, so why not try to make it last forever?
In that regard, I feel as if the album and bits from the tour do a way better job of conveying the themes that The Moment presents. I mentioned the voicemail earlier, and while I think that scene is fine in isolation, I feel as if we could have benefited from her showing these feelings more instead of just telling the audience that she doesn’t want to go back to relative obscurity.
Despite that, I did ultimately come away feeling that The Moment was a solid film. Skarsgård is a bit too distracting as Johannes Godwin, which probably says more about the over-the-top nature of the character himself than Skarsgård’s acting. Everyone else delivers pretty realistic performances that capture the stress of preparing for something as big as an arena tour. Still, I don’t think it does a great job of presenting itself as a mockumentary. Most of the time, no one even acknowledges that a camera team exists, save for a moment at the very beginning where one of Charli’s people looks directly down the lens. It often feels more like a Succession episode than anything else. I don’t view that as a negative, but I also don’t think that was the intended reception.
What we’ve learned over the last several years is that Charli is a pop artist with reasonable insecurities about her place in the music industry. In simplest terms, she wants to be remembered, but for the right reasons. There are a couple of times in The Moment where she pokes fun at her older work, including a driver listening to “Boom Clap” and a raised eyebrow when Crash gets mentioned. It’s clear that even though she can look back on those moments somewhat fondly, that was not the legacy she wants to leave.
At this point, it’s fair to say that Brat will be remembered (though how much of that will be because of the music versus the cultural moment surrounding it remains to be seen), but what comes next? An even bigger album than Brat? An unprecedentedly massive falloff? The immediate answer to that question is that Charli produced the soundtrack of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation. But after that, who’s to say? Regardless, The Moment was a very appropriate way to finally put this section of her career to rest. Brat Summer… forever?