‘The Moment’ Review: Charli xcx Is a Version of Herself in a Mockumentary That Plays It Straight…But Should Have Played It Smarter

“The Moment” kicks off with black-and-white strobe images of Charli xcx writhing on the floor in skimpy torn clothing, as an industrial beat pounds away with apocalyptic fury on the soundtrack. In other words, this could be one of her videos. The movie then mixes in a montage of news clips reporting on Brat Summer, the music/culture/style/celebrity/marketing juggernaut that was spun out of “brat,” the 2024 Charli xcx album that became a global phenomenon.

“The Moment,” in theory, is a mockumentary, set during the weeks when Charli is preparing to launch a massive worldwide brat tour. But the word “mockumentary” has connotations that, in this case, need to be instantly dispelled. The movie isn’t a cheeky satirical pop-music lampoon, like “This Is Spinal Tap” (the film that invented the form) or Christopher Guest’s “A Mighty Wind” or Andy Samberg’s “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.” It’s a mock documentary played straight. And it’s not just that the jokes are understated (a generous way to put it, given that the jokes are so understated you’re barely going to laugh at them). It’s that Charli xcx, in “The Moment,” really is playing a close-up version of herself, and what the movie presents isn’t so much a comedy landscape as an alternate-reality version of the world in which Charli xcx actually exists.

Ferried around in SUVs, surrounded by frenetic handlers, she’s the eye at the center of the pop-media storm, whirling from photo shoots to brand endorsements to appearances on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and a British Vogue “What’s in My Bag?” segment, even as the executives at Atlantic Records, led by the formidable Tammy (Rosanna Arquette), attempt to raise the ante on all this by pushing ahead to the question: How can Brat Summer be extended? They’re really asking: How can we keep the money flowing? Even the way Charli’s handlers confront her with a never-ending onslaught of fawning praise mixed with nattering demands, to the point that they make Jay Kelly look like someone in danger of being ignored, is all about the money. The Charli we see is a true artist of dance pop, and one of the hottest celebrities in the world, but what that really means is that she’s the golden goose: the one everyone puts on a pedestal so that those golden eggs can keep coming.

The first idea they come up with is that Charli should endorse a new credit card, launched by Britain’s Howard Stirling Bank, aimed at young queer people. (It’s hipster capitalism.) And when it’s proposed that Charli should now, of course, do a concert film, that seems a bull’s-eye extension of where she’s at, and everyone is onboard. Amazon MGM Studios will back the project. The only question is: Who will be the director? The name that bubbles to the surface is Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), a hot helmer who, according to Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), Charli’s creative director and close confidante, “basically makes adverts for women.” That’s supposed to be a red flag. But after a hastily assembled Zoom meeting in which Charli tells Johannes that she simply needs someone to record the show, and he agrees, the concert film seems set, and Brat Summer looks ready to roll on.

Aidan Zamiri, the 29-year-old Scottish photographer and music-video maven who’s the first-time director of “The Moment,” does a good job of staging the early scenes of the movie as, in essence, a documentary. The Charli xcx we see is simply herself, and she’s quite captivating, with her dark eyebrows and fuck-it-all attitude and middle-class-princess-of-Essex-gone-bad-girl way. And the hubbub around her is an effective enactment of the multitasking pressures a contempo pop star faces.

Then Johannes shows up. Alexander Skarsgård, who resembles a very tall version of Jim Carrey, plays him with a passive-aggressive fatuousness that is, in itself, a bit Carrey-like. Johannes thinks that everything about Charli and her show is fantastic! Except for everything about it that he’d like to change.

If you wanted to tell the forces of Christian nationalism why tradwife culture is never going to take hold the way that they want it to, you could explain it all in two words: Charli xcx. Just watch the video for “Guess,” the song she did with Billie Eilish — though the video is ruled by Charli, which means that it’s all come-hither-but-be-warned erotic abandon, from the liquid way she moves her body (every inch of it seems to quiver) to the way she tosses off words in her accent that’s equal parts posh and punk to her whole captivating air of dominatrix delirium. What Robert Plant was to the ’70s, what Madonna and Prince and Axl Rose were to the ’80s, what Britney Spears was to the ’90s…Charli xcx is to today. She’s an intoxicating siren song of sexual danger you’d be hard-pressed to resist. In a world with Charli xcx, how trad is a wife really going to want to go?

In “The Moment,” everyone onscreen seems to understand what Charli is about: the handlers, the record-company executives, the talk-show hosts, the advertisers, the Tim Gunn costume person, the surge of fans. But there’s one person who, for some reason, doesn’t get it at all: Johannes, the director of the concert film. Early on, when he sees that Charli is flashing a nasty sexual word on stage and singing a song about cocaine, he asks if she can tone it down. He wants the movie to be presentable for a “family” audience. Johannes, in other words, is the same stooge we’ve seen in a thousand satires — the lame voice of corporate blanding, the one who fights the artist-hero to neuter her voice. The argument made by Johannes is the same one this character always makes. He’s saying: Let’s make more money! It’s what Col. Parker said to Elvis and what movie producers have said to every great director in the history of cinema.

But in the case of Charli xcx, Johannes’ demands are more than oppressive. They’re eccentric, because they make no sense. Charli xcx is an awesome dance-pop star, a saturnine goddess who has the world in her hand. But apart from how electric her music is, her brand is bad-girl subversion. That’s how she moves product. So when Johannes, the doofus dictator, tells her to scale it back, to lose the naughtiness, to cut down on the strobe-light aggression and substitute what everyone in the movie says looks like an onstage lava lamp, he’s literally asking her to neuter the thing that makes her successful. Why would Charli go along with it?

The answer is supposed to be that she’s still fighting the tyranny of a male-dominated music industry. But Charli xcx, as “The Moment” presents her, has already shot far beyond that. She has used her own raw aggression as a pop star to put the male suits in their place. And so the scenario that unfolds in “The Moment” doesn’t parse, either as satire or as mock drama. It hinges on Charli, in a tizzy, going to Ibiza for a quick vacation, where she runs into Kylie Jenner (playing herself), who talks up Johannes as a genius and as a director she herself wanted to use (but couldn’t because he had already committed to Charli’s project). This is supposed to set off a fatal fit of jealous insecurity on Charli’s part.

And then…there’s the credit-card disaster. Charli, through a text on social media, somehow sets off a chain reaction, so that all the queer folk who got the brat card try to win free concert tickets…which crashes the system…and brings the Howard Stirling Bank to ruin…but I can’t truly explain how any of this happens, because it’s all presented in such a slipshod manner. I’m sorry, but this is not how an effective mockumentary works. I actually think “The Moment” should have pushed further into crackpot satirical extremes. In that case, it wouldn’t have been a movie that featured a “real” version of Charlie xcx. But it might have made you laugh more, because it would have been genuinely outlandish rather than just unconvincing.