Remember, in 2022, when Crash was coming out, and Charli XCX implied Atlantic was somehow forcing her to make TikToks? This set off a mini panic at the time, but I think she was playing us. The Moment is that idea—the meta-level story of the pop star who becomes a casualty of the pop machine—with the budget of someone who convinced A24 to let her star in a BRAT movie.

The Moment lands between a celebrity thriller, reality television, and a pop concert documentary that’s headed off the rails. The film is fictional but its premise isn’t: In 2024, Charli XCX (played by Charli XCX) is a famous pop star and her new album, BRAT, is a global sensation. She’s guesting on Colbert, tour begins in weeks, and everyone—brands, fans, her label—wants a piece. Now that she’s more famous than ever, she’s responsible for keeping this big money train rolling. The characters in The Moment are working on a BRAT concert film (sponsored by Amazon, we’re told); the movie we’re watching is the drama of their creative differences.

Right away, we’re in Charli’s entourage, alongside her manager (Jamie Demetriou) trying to shield her from problems, the label exec (Rosanna Arquette) trying to fulfill the Amazon deal, and the stage manager (Hailey Benton Gates in the best supporting performance) trying to keep her creative vision intact. The first half of The Moment often reminded me of work—of my actual job at Pitchfork, including Charli’s fake “What’s in My Bag?” shoot for British Vogue, the earnest pleas of her social media coordinator (“It’s just one post!”), the label’s upscale corporate headquarters, the way record execs instantly recognize their own and congeal into a schmooze.

In one of her first major acting roles, Charli is best when she’s being, what else, a brat, but also a shitty boss: playing her staff off each other, absenting herself from any real decision-making, and evacuating in the Escalade. And she’s nowhere near as hateable as Alexander Skarsgård’s odious Johannes, the Amazon-approved concert doc director. He’s almost too one-note: painfully square and straight, tasteless and pushy. He talks over women and he thinks Coldplay are cutting-edge—he’s totally irredeemable and permanently in charge.

The Moment is one-third mockumentary and, like, two-thirds reality TV. The characters perceive the camera, get annoyed when they’d prefer privacy, and never let go of their iPhones. Someone’s phone is always vibrating, a gimmick that often strikes me as contrived in a movie-movie but feels totally normalized in a reality-movie like The Moment. A.G. Cook’s score lights up for extra-diegetic dance sequences and other moments when Charli appears alone but otherwise lurks in the background. Even the establishing shots start to evoke those time-lapse interstitials on reality shows.

Phenomenologically you want to ask, Who is shooting this film? It’s a question The Moment never answers. The movie is “based on an original idea by Charli XCX” (she sold 1,500 T-shirts that say so) and the debut feature from Aidan Zamiri, director of Charli’s music videos for “Guess” and “360,” as well as a surreal ad called “Timothée Chalomet for Cash App.” The line between reality and fiction is super thin—The Moment’s primary subplot involves Charli shilling a lime-green credit card targeted at queer Zoomers (also reminiscent of Daylight, the disastrous LGBTQ+ banking startup) because she’s basically saying yes to anything at this point. As soon as they mention “BRAT credit card,” you know the backlash is coming.

But the comedic pacing could be a little tighter because sometimes, having seen the BRAT tour twice, I wondered if I wouldn’t rather be watching Charli’s actual concert film, and not the tacky one Johannes is making. Her live performance sequences are as electric on camera as in real life. Don’t expect to hear much BRAT music, though, because The Moment is not a movie about a concert film, it’s a film satirizing the social logic and financial incentives that structure the major-label video-content pipeline. That’s too bad because the music’s great. Johannes, you’ll notice, never talks about any of the music at all.

Photo courtesy of A24

The Moment gives this quote to Benton Gates’ character, but the real Charli XCX is clearly determined not to make another “repetitive” pop star concert doc. The film she’s in is like a darker, younger-millennial update on the Lonely Island’s 2016 classic Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, with a dose of the multimedia metaparody in Alex Ross Perry’s Pavement film Pavements and an instinct for online that’s distinctly Charli. Popstar’s Conner4Real offended his queer fanbase simply by releasing a “no homo” gay-rights song (a moment to remember Rita Ora’s “Girls,” anyone?) but The Moment evolves the controversy to account for fintech, sponcon, scamming, exclusive presales for Chase Sapphire Reserve cardholders, and a pervasive atmosphere of chaos and fear. It’s 2026 to the hilt. Zamiri doesn’t really bother filming fans rushing Charli’s car or whatever—this has been the quintessential mock-pop-doc scene since A Hard Day’s Night but these days the fans rush you online.

It’s also clear The Moment is a debut: Something about its nightmarish blend of reality and “reality” doesn’t quite gel completely, and the for-real brand deals (Beats, Skims, Aperol Spritz) would be distracting even if they weren’t RGB strobing in a way that kept giving me flashbacks to Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor. But it’s a smarter movie than it looks and a lot more ambitious than most pop “documentaries.” Seriously, what have we been doing without a female pop star satire? Like Popstar and Pavements, The Moment takes aim at a whole infrastructure of music and celebrity. It’s at least as effective at capturing a particular ethos and, OK, moment of pop culture and, unlike the stars of those movies, Charli serves looks. (Not sure about this one, but mostly, looks.) It’s gonna be a cult club classic.