360, when you're in the mirror, do you like what you see?
It’s just so hard being rich and successful, you know? People expect things of you. We hear this in music all the time; most artists who achieve headline status eventually put out a song about how lonely it is up there with their giant sacks of money and gold records. A few off the top of my head: Billy Joel’s “The Entertainer,” Britney Spears’ “Lucky,” Taylor Swift’s “The Lucky One,” David Bowie’s “Fame.” (All bangers, for the record.) I’ve always admired Good Charlotte’s response to becoming an unlikely figurehead of pop-punk not by complaining about fame but by turning the tables and mocking celebrity sob jobs in “Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous.”
We see it in movies, too. Federico Fellini’s sensational 8½ is the most revered example of a film about how gosh-darned miserable it is to be a great and successful filmmaker, and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, which I also love, is essentially his photocopy of 8½. More recently, Damien Chazelle made Babylon, which is very clearly an overcorrection to La La Land‘s sentimentality toward Hollywood after he got a proper taste of it.
And so now we have The Moment, which straddles the two mediums: Musician Charli XCX’s semi-autobiographical drama about coping with the hangover of her breakout mega-smash album Brat and its viral “Brat summer” marketing campaign. I have to admit that, as cool as Charli is and as self-aware as she is about the crass commercialism of art, even great art (and Brat certainly is great), I cannot get over the hump inherent in asking us to shed tears for an artist who achieved her goals, became fabulously wealthy, and earned millions of admirers… and yet still feels kinda bummed out.
To its credit, the movie acknowledges the snare it has wandered into, even if it still ends up with a bear trap around its ankle. This is not a tour documentary (Charli turned one of those down) but a narrative drama, an alternate-timeline 2024 faux cinéma vérité contraption about the making of a fictional concert doc, dramatizing a version of the Brat rollout that never actually happened. In this telling, Charli is browbeaten by Atlantic Records into brand deals and creative sandings-down she publicly resisted in real life, including a running gag of a Brat-branded credit card. Riding herd over the new concert film is director Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), the human face of every force that wants to sanitize and shelf-stabilize a messy female artist into something a sponsor can love. (The Moment is very obviously taking a shot at the airbrushed, mega-produced Taylor Swift concert-film model, but that’s low-hanging fruit.)
The most gripping stretch of the film, though, comes before any of that satire: a strobe-lit club performance intro that drops you straight into Charli’s chaotic headspace. It has unflinching, almost alienating, muscularity (one Letterboxd user opined the intro “could kill a grandpa”). The visual language of the remainder of The Moment is not quite so extreme, instead using a grainy and immersive faux-documentary style. And I do like the look: Even when the film isn’t working as a story, it offers a surprisingly cohesive and pleasing presentation.
It’s too bad it doesn’t have enough bite to get over its inherent contradictions. The problem is that satire needs both a rich story and sharp perspective to properly function, and The Moment doesn’t have either. Charli is a producer and visionary of a movie skewering the commodification of Charli. She can’t fully disassemble the ouroboros. The tone is off: The movie lunges for a Safdie-style anxiety spiral in the middle act and it never quite draws blood. (This film made me further appreciate last year’s Lurker, also about the music industry, which has some overlapping themes and visual style.) The Moment doesn’t have enough wit to slice through its mopiness and angst about Charli’s rich people problems. It sags, too, running long for what it is. The ironic ending of showing us the concert film we’re primed to hate is clever in theory, but in practice just made me wonder if we would have been better off in the first place with the concert movie she apparently doesn’t want to make. (And I mean that as a compliment; her music is terrific and worthy of big-screen spectacle.)
The acting is pretty uneven, but Skarsgård is miles ahead of everyone else, making your skin crawl with diplomatic double-speak and artsy smarminess. He’s having such pretentious, oily fun that the whole thing dips a little whenever he’s offscreen. These dips include extended conversations between Charli and celebrity cameos, like Kylie Jenner and Rachel Sennott, who just don’t bring enough spark with Charli to make those scenes work.
And Charli herself is something of a mixed bag. She’s a better, more interior actress than you might expect out of a career musician, but she is frankly out of her depth trying to carry a movie as ambitious and layered as this.
This is the feature debut of Aidan Zamiri, a music video director making the jump to narrative, and you can see he has sufficient filmmaking style to land the flashier moments. It’s odd, then, that he’s stuck in a style of realism, though it more-or-less works. He struggles to sustain narrative momentum, which is not surprising for someone coming from music videos.
Charl XCX is a wonder as a musician, and she has some really provocative and bold ideas about defying and commenting upon the music and movie industry. She gives it the ol’ college try in The Moment, and I admire her for that. I really wish The Moment worked. It’s just a little bit self-indulgent and mushy for me.
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.
3 replies on “The Moment (2026)”
Personally I liked it and thought it was an interesting dive into the lens of fame pressures and always having to make that next big “spectacle” especially in the context of being a celebrity like a pop star. I definitely see how it could be easy to become self induldgent, as even though it spirals in tension it never builds in terms of layers of depth, but rather just sits on the focus of Charli’s stress. Still thought it was pretty entertaining though. I wrote about it on my site too so you can check that out if ya want. btw thanks for putting in the kill a grandpa review lol, hardest I’ve laughed at a letterboxd review in a while
Thanks for reading and commenting Eli. I’m glad you liked it, it’s definitely not a terrible watch and I could see liking it more watching in a different mood, I just hoped it would be a little bit more clever and less, as you say, self-indulgent. I’ll definitely go read your review though
Much love to XCX – she had me at ‘Boom Clap’, has rewarded my affection with some rather good music since and is a treat to watch to boot – but I may or may not bother to watch this one.
Also, of course Skarsgard A is head and shoulders above the rest, dude is Viking Huge! (On a more serious note, the man is just good value for money: somewhere out there is a universe in which he played The Mighty Thor whilst his dad played Donald Blake M.D. and I would also have paid to see that movie*).
*Admittedly Thor is probably my favourite Marvel superhero, even if they seem to have tapered off on the delightfully-cheesy mock Shakespearean dialogue these days.