With concert films now a cinematic rite of passage — offering fans one last communal high while doubling as a farewell cash-in — it takes something special to bend the format into something new. Enter Charli XCX, one of pop’s most restless shape-shifters, who uses The Moment (Now open in NY and LA) to give the brat era the send-off it deserves. Part mockumentary, part manifesto, part existential spiral, the film interrogates what it actually costs to finally break into the pop-culture zeitgeist after years of grinding on the margins. As a longtime Charli fan, I was immediately locked in.
Set during rehearsals for the 2024 brat tour — a tour less about promoting an album and more about immortalizing an attitude — the film treats brat as both aesthetic and ethos: reckless, confrontational, unpolished, and allergic to corporate smoothing. Naturally, that puts Charli at odds with her label, who partner with Amazon and enlist milquetoast director (and Coldplay enthusiast) Johannes, played by Alexander Skarsgård, to turn the underground club energy into something more mass-market friendly and less feminist. What follows is less a production dispute than a battle over the soul of brat, with Charli’s tour creative director Celeste who never once wavers, as Charli has a side quest in Ibiza.
That tension mirrors Charli’s own internal conflict: fear that this moment of relevance might never happen again, coupled with the desire to wring everything she can from it while it lasts — all while very transparently skewering the industry’s preference for safer, shinier pop personas. (I mean, it’s why I had a Capital One card, sorry Taylor, still love ya.)
Formally, the film borrows the handheld, blown-out strobe aesthetic of the tour itself, unfolding in loose vignettes as Charli drifts through rehearsals, meetings, and ego bruises in her signature black Givenchy shades, dispensing dry wit with machine-gun precision. It’s sharp, drug-free chaos — she is rehearsing after all— and the satire spares no one, including Charli herself. When the sunglasses come off, she reveals something far less bulletproof: a woman wrestling with time, relevance, and the absurdity of building a self out of public projection.
Anyone who caught Charli on SNL knows she has real comedic chops, but what surprised me most was her dramatic range in the film’s quieter moments. When people in her orbit casually comment on her “shelf life” — as a pop star and as a woman — the toll is palpable, and she uses the character to explore those anxieties with unexpected emotional clarity. It’s when those moments collide with the film’s more absurdist comedy in the third act that The Moment fully locks into place, transforming its pop-industrial satire into something sharper and more personal.
The Moment ultimately works because it’s less interested in documenting Charli XCX than dismantling her — then rebuilding her on her own terms. It’s a smart, assured, deeply self-aware deconstruction of pop stardom from someone who spent years watching the gates stay shut before finally kicking them in. Like all things brat, Charli does it her way: funny, prickly, vulnerable, and allergic to polish. Walking out, it’s hard not to feel like you’ve watched not just a clever genre remix, but the arrival of a genuinely compelling screen presence — one who can mock the machinery of pop while still exposing the human cost underneath it.
