PARK CITY, Utah — The line of people hoping to see Charli xcx’s first of three movies at the Sundance Film Festival late Friday night was like nothing many longtime festivalgoers had seen.
At a 40 year-old festival where the die-hards trend even older, it was remarkable to see so many people in their teens and early 20s holding up signs, wearing slime-green “brat”-branded outfits, and pleading for spare tickets to “The Moment,” a close-to-life A24 mockumentary about a bratty British pop star, named Charli xcx, who is driven insane by competing forces of fame and finally abdicates her creative voice to become a complete sellout.
If that sounds like a dark alt-history of what actually happened in 2024, when the real Charli’s album “Brat” led to a world-sweeping phenomenon of unbridled slacker joy — well, that’s exactly the point of her self-skewering film.
“This movie is about the end of an era,” Charli said when she entered the building, telling the crowd she was honored to premiere in a year when Sundance itself is leavingits longtime home of Park City. Later, the line of people trying to get into the after-party on Main Street was so long and emotionally charged that the police of this small mountain city had to corral them off the street with horses.
“Brat summer” was about being unapologetically confident and messy, plus loving to party, embodied by a slime-green color scheme and a lowercase sans serif font that is the closest thing in graphic design to saying you absolutely don’t care what anyone thinks and are too lazy to try. Young women and LGBTQ fans embraced Charli’s grungy aesthetic as antidote to the artist’s metaphoric musical nemesis, the ultra-polished self-styled “English teacher,” Taylor Swift.
“The Moment” is, essentially, about the commercial forces that turn all but the strongest-willed female artists into telegenic, family-friendly clones. (In a cameo, Kylie Jenner runs into Charli at a spa retreat in Ibiza and advises her to lean into overexposure.)
The first feature film by Aidan Zamiri (better known for directing music videos such as Charli’s “360” and “Guess”) the mockumentary is a frenetic and often funny satirical look inside the artist’s life as she is pressured by Rosanna Arquette’s callous record executive, who wants her to squeeze every ounce she can out of “brat summer.” Overriding all of her creative instincts, Charli hires a cloying director (Alexander Skarsgård, who’s clearly having so much fun he steals the entire movie) to make a concert tour film obviously styled after Swift’s famous Eras project.
It starts out bad, when Skarsgård’s character suggests they pass out light-up wristbands “like Coldplay does.” By the time Charli is being hoisted up in a harness above a giant green glittery cigarette lighter in a shredded green dress, flinging her arms from side to side as directed by a teleprompter, we know she’s lost not just the battle but the war.
The audience roared with laughter throughout the film — especially at the end, when the concert film’s credits show it was presented by Amazon Prime.
“I’m obviously quite related to my character so I had a lot of inspiration to pull from,” Charli joked after the theater lights went up. “Right now, I’m like the me in that film. I am sort of, like, really wanting ‘brat’ to stop and [trying to get] as far away from it as possible” — even though she is absolutely still milking her cultural moment from 2024 by making an entire A24 movie about it.
“That’s not because I don’t love it,” she said, “but I think all of us as artists, you want to challenge yourself and you want to switch the creative soup that you’re in and live in a different bowl for a while.”
Charli’s new creative soup includes a ton of film projects. While she has acted intermittently throughout her musical career, she is debuting two films at Sundance besides “The Moment.” She plays against type as Cooper Hoffman’s prudish girlfriend in Greg Araki’s comedy “I Want Your Sex,” and joined Natalie Portman and Jenna Ortega in “The Gallerist,” a dark satire about an art gallerist who tries to sell a dead body at Art Basel Miami.
But “The Moment” clearly dominated Charli’s other projects at Sundance, raising speculation that it could become the next classic satire after it releases in theaters Friday.
“This film wouldn’t exist without Rob Reiner and ‘Spinal Tap,’” Zamiri, the director, told the audience. But he said horror films like “Black Swan” were no less an inspiration than mockumentaries, as the film shows Charli losing her sense of self.
“I would like to think I’m not as much of a nightmare as Charli in the film,” the singer said after the screening. “I think I am as an artist quite a volatile person. And nice. I’m quite nice, too, right?”
She turned to Zamiri with a demanding look.
“Right? Right?”
“Right,” he said, looking mock-terrified.
“Too f—ing right,” she replied, as the theater burst into laughter.
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