‘The Moment’ Review: Charli xcx is brat+ in Trappings of Fame Mock Doc [B] | Sundance

On Friday night at the Eccles Theatre in Park City, Utah, Sundance attendees found themselves in the midst of an unplanned Charli xcx double feature. The pop star first appeared against type in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, a piece of stunt casting that sent a mild shockwave through the post-screening crowd. She resurfaced shortly afterward in The Moment, playing a version of herself so familiar it barely qualifies as a character. Seen back to back, the films offered an inadvertent diptych: Charli xcx as pliable performer, and Charli xcx as intellectual property—self-aware, hyper-mediated, and increasingly estranged from the machinery built to amplify her voice.

Aidan Zamiri’s debut feature is a mockumentary set in September 2024, in the brief interregnum between the euphoric saturation of “brat summer” and the logistical grind of a global tour. With Charli’s album still ricocheting across social platforms, her label, Atlantic Records, is eager to extend the cultural half-life of the moment. Their chosen vehicle is a concert film, handed to Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), a gaudy director whose authority derives less from insight than from volume. From its earliest scenes, The Moment frames pop stardom as a process of attrition: not collapse or corruption, but the steady erosion of taste, agency, and intention under the weight of branding.

Charli drifts through meetings and photo ops surrounded by an entourage perpetually transfixed by their phones, responding to her comments with the blank affirmations of people trained to smooth rather than listen. The business decisions floated—among them, an endorsement deal for a brat-branded credit-debit card—are so nakedly opportunistic that they initially play as satire, before settling into something closer to reportage. Only Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), Charli’s creative director, speaks with conviction about mood, texture, and artistic coherence. Inspired by Charli’s real-life collaborator Imogene Strauss, Celeste functions as the film’s moral center, a reminder that soul still exists somewhere beneath the algorithmic churn.

Johannes’s arrival tips the balance. He mansplains every creative choice with monkish calm, invoking scale and family friendliness as if they were virtues rather than evasions. When Charli abruptly flees to Ibiza—less a vacation than a vanishing act—Celeste is left to spar with him alone, fighting a losing battle against a system that equates compromise with professionalism.

Formally, The Moment adopts the grammar of the mockumentary—handheld camerawork, staged spontaneity—while repeatedly undermining its own claims to authenticity. A rotating cast of celebrity cameos, including Stephen Colbert, Rachel Sennott, Kylie Jenner, Julia Fox, Errol Barnett, and Mel Ottenberg, appear as themselves, lending the film a breathless, name-check energy. Some of these moments flirt with inside baseball, reducing the backstage world to a parade of recognizable faces rather than a sustained creative ecosystem. The film’s early disclaimer, noting that certain names have been changed, further destabilizes the pretense of vérité, tacitly acknowledging that what we are watching has been curated as carefully as any brand rollout.

The self-awareness occasionally sharpens into wit. When Sennott’s Rachel asks Charli whether the concert film will be like the Joaquin Phoenix movie, the reference to I’m Still Here lands as both joke and thesis statement—a reminder that mockumentary has long been a genre obsessed with authenticity as performance. Zamiri understands that the illusion of access is often more powerful than access itself.

Where The Moment succeeds most is in its skit-like moments of dissonance. A brief exchange between Charli and her driver (Ethan Moorhouse), who has no idea who she is and gamely attempts to place her somewhere near Leona Lewis, punctures the star’s bubble of relevance. Fame, the scene suggests, is both total and strangely brittle, dissolving the moment it leaves its intended audience.

Skarsgård’s performance anchors the satire. His Johannes is not a tyrant so much as a vacuum, sucking meaning out of every room he enters. Skarsgård nails the specific cadence of institutional arrogance—the soothing voice, the empty abstractions, the certainty mistaken for insight. The character may be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has navigated creative industries dominated by this particular strain of cishet male caucasity, but the recognition is the joke.

Visually, Zamiri periodically abandons realism altogether. Flashing title cards and intrusive logos nod toward the graphic provocations of Gaspar Noé collaborator Tom Kan, while editors Billy Sneddon and Neal Farmer keep the film moving at a clipped, anxious pace. Several sequences veer into outright horror, suggesting an A24-inflected vision of pop stardom as bodily and psychological siege. Charli’s Ibiza detour turns briefly bloody, a grotesque flourish that literalizes the costs of perpetual self-extraction.

In an era when music documentaries increasingly function as deluxe extensions of public relations campaigns, The Moment is notable for its refusal to mythologize its subject. It plays less like a victory lap than a confession, or perhaps an apology—to fans, to collaborators, to the artist herself. The film’s central insight is neither radical nor comforting: pop music may sell rebellion, authenticity, and intimacy, but it remains, at its core, a business. And moments—brat or otherwise—are fleeting commodities, always already being packaged for the next quarter.

Grade: B

This review is from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival where The Moment had its world premiere. A24 will release the film theatrically on January 30.