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The Charli XCX mockumentary “The Moment” is a satire that feels like a snuff film. No pop artist has ever survived haters, handlers and hangers-on without a scratch. Energy vampires are everywhere, thirsty for a selfie or a sound bite or a Zoom. When you’re at the top, as Charli XCX was a year and a half ago at the peak of “brat summer,” the only path ahead is a tightrope between cool and cringe. So she’s made a movie about her urge to jump. Brat est mort, vive le brat!
Here’s a quick primer on Charli XCX if your only awareness of her is a flash of acid green and her tongue-in-cheek tweet that “Kamala IS brat,” which, gauging from the metrics, one in five Americans has seen. Born Charlotte Emma Aitchison in Cambridge, England, in 1992, she’s a hyper-intelligent British singer-songwriter who self-launched on MySpace at the age of 14 and within the year was performing at warehouse dance parties. Journalists joked about her long quest for fame over a decade ago; her ascension felt delayed in part because she’d started it so young.
That’s handy history to know when “The Moment,” co-written by Bertie Brandes and Aidan Zamiri (the latter of whom makes his feature directing debut), stares dubiously at her as she confesses that she has “spent my whole life trying to get approval.” That line delivery is a naked self-critique. Charli XCX has a story credit on the script and isn’t asking for pity. She’s glad she’s finally at the center of attention, even though the trade-off is becoming increasingly invisible behind the “Brat” brand: an exhausted rave-wraith herded around by a wall of zombie-brained managers and assistants who march in lockstep after the money.
Onscreen, her creative director Celeste (a clear-eyed Hailey Benton Gates) wants to burn “Brat” down. Her tour documentary director Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård) wants to hype “Brat” forever. Whose advice should she take?
Fans know that Charli XCX did destroy the “Brat” backdrop of her real-life tour, tearing it from the rafters four minutes into her performance at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and setting it on artificial fire at Glastonbury. At the latter, she capped the carnage with an onscreen message that read, “I don’t know who I am if it’s over.”
Well, she does know. She’s an actor — for now — who’s racked up seven films in two years (cameos, mostly, but so far she’s pretty good). “The Moment” is her biggest role, and the one that requires the most acting even though she’s playing her id, a wayward and selfish golem of her worst impulses, a voodoo doll suffering all the mistakes she’s trying not to make.
Even if you don’t know her music, the film still works an acidic sketch of fame — “Spinal Tap” for the era of stan culture. One minute, she’s floundering for the right reaction to a suicidal devotee who claims her music saved his life, the next she’s showing her videos to a chauffeur who replies that she looks worse in person. There’s so much noise around her that she can’t always hear her conscience. When she agrees to endorse a green “Brat”-branded credit card, she sets herself up for more perilous exposure than when she gyrates in her skivvies.
The pop-star-to-film-star flight path often ends in a crash. Yet today’s female performers are tasked to perform all the time, even setting up cameras in their bathrooms to live-stream how they scrub their face. Charli XCX’s appeal is that she seems to be simultaneously broadcasting her own anthropological dissertation on the surreality of fame, say when she did a promotional pit stop at Vogue magazine called “In the Bag,” where beauties usually hawk their favorite lipsticks and perfumes, and whipped out a banana. In “The Moment,” she does that segment again, only this time she doesn’t know what her assistants have stashed in her purse.
Zamiri splices the movie with colorful strobes that nod to her concert Jumbotrons while making the point that stardom is exhilarating and disorienting. (Even the cautionary title about the flashing is flashing.) Stylistically, there are too many camera set-ups for even the shammiest pretense of being an actual documentary, but Zamiri has already shored himself up against that quibble by casting known faces as civilians, including Kate Berlant as a make-up artist and Rosanna Arquette as a pushy Atlantic Records executive. Skarsgård is especially great as a manipulative career hijacker who insists on a factory-stamped, family-friendly version of fame that involves hoisting Charli XCX up on wires where she dangles spine-straight, looking as miserable as a cat on a leash.
The only feint that anyone is taking the faux-doc framework seriously is when Rachel Sennott, playing herself, asks if Charli XCX is “doing a Joaquin Phoenix thing?” as in that actor’s more hostile “Borat”-style 2010 film “I’m Still Here,” in which he risked his career convincing the press that he’d pivoted to hip-hop. He had legitimate reasons to mock journalists for blurting rude questions about his dead brother River Phoenix on the red carpet. A reclusive star, he’s happier when eyeballs are on his craft.
But Charli XCX likes the craft and the spotlight, so she uses her movie to make fun of herself before anyone else can. (Similarly, she titled “Brat’s” remix album “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat,” and its deluxe edition “Brat and It’s the Same but There’s Three More Songs So It’s Not.”)
Zamiri must have earned her trust for this project by directing two videos for that record, both of which also successfully savage her persona. In one, he visualized a sexy ditty about underwear as a disaster movie with flying panties. In the other, Charli XCX bounced braless on a vibration plate while pouring red wine all over her chest: a boobtacular shot repurposed here on the wall of a conference room. This time, Zamiri adds another punchline — the corporate suits all call her jiggling “innovative.”
The script could have used an extra pass. There’s a metaphor about a trapped bird in her rehearsal space that doesn’t land and a weak attempt to juice tension that the label might actually prefer her dead. To my shock, one of the best scenes is a run-in between Charli XCX and Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the five Kardashian sisters, who grew up steeped in the strange reality of living her life on TV. “The second you think people are getting sick of you, you have to go harder,” Kylie says with a grin. That’s fair advice if you want to be famous for being famous. A genuine artist should think twice.
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