The first day of filming on The Moment was an “odd one,” Charli XCX admits. The Grammy-winning artist, playing an alternate-reality version of herself in her biggest acting role to date, was set to shoot a tense scene opposite frequent collaborator Rachel Sennott, who was similarly spoofing her real-life persona. Sennott had arrived “in the back of a van from Paris” where she’d been for a Balenciaga show, Charli says, only for the two stars to be squeezed into “this impossible bathroom with three stalls and a huge mirror” alongside director Aidan Zamiri and cinematographer Sean Price Williams. Then came the heavy improv.
“Sean’s wandering around with fucking camera, Rachel was shipped in literally overnight,” Charli says with a nostalgic smile over Zoom, as Zamiri laughs along right beside her. “And yet it was so easy with her. She gets it. She gets our world. She could have done this with her eyes closed, hanging upside down.” Zamiri adds, “It was by accident that this was the first thing we shot, and I was very grateful. With that scene, we discovered the personality of how we wanted to shoot this film.”
The Moment, which premieres Friday at the Sundance Film Festival before A24 releases it in theaters on Jan. 30, has been defined by that spontaneous, chaotic spirit from its inception — that is, from a little over a year ago. Charli’s sixth studio album, brat, had just exploded culturally in a way the Essex native had never experienced before: It topped the charts around the world, emerged instantly and resoundingly as the record of the summer, and gradually went so mainstream as to directly inspire the aesthetic of Kamala Harris’s ill-fated presidential campaign. Inevitably, Charli started getting asked about making a blockbuster documentary out of her upcoming headlining arena tour around the world. But she was not interested. “It wasn’t something that really spoke to me as an artist,” she says. “I’m really always interested in flipping the form.”
Instead, Charli sent Zamiri, a close friend who’d directed the beloved music video for the brat single “360” (which features Sennott), a document with some thoughts on the swelling, swirling success. “It was a piece of writing that captured the complexities of what it’s like to achieve something that you’ve worked half your life for, but then to feel how fragile and how fleeting that might be,” he says. “Charli is able to be extremely honest in a way that most people would be frightened of —” he turns toward her mid-thought — “but I don’t think it scares you.” She nods, then booms with laughter: “I just do it, then regret it all.”
Written by Zamiri with fellow first-time screenwriter Bertie Brandes, The Moment is nothing if not honest. Taking the form of a wryly revealing mockumentary, the movie plays like an alternate history of Charli’s brat tour — imagining the fallout if she’d said yes to making a concert doc. Her team, played by the likes of Hailey Benton Gates, Kate Berlant, Jamie Demetriou and Rosanna Arquette, splinters over the direction; Charli grapples with an identity crisis in struggling to let brat go. “I don’t know what I fucking want!” Charli (the character) helplessly screams.
“A lot of our considerations were really about [how] the character of Charli in the film is not the same as the real-world Charli — she’s fictional — but it’s also a version of her that could have existed in some different circumstances,” Zamiri says. “We wanted to make sure that everything that Charli did felt reasonable in some version of the universe.”
The first draft was written in a mere 10 days, finished on New Year’s Eve of 2024; filming began three months later. Zamiri and Brandes went back and forth with Charli on the script’s beats to ensure both material and emotional accuracy, while sticking to her original document’s philosophy. Charli viewed The Moment as a chance to be more truthful about the music industry than anything she’d previously seen in a narrative film.
“Being an artist within [the industry], you really get to control every single element of what is put out about you — the angle from which your face is shot; the edits of your music videos; the edits of your product placement, photo shoots, whatever,” Charli says. “That controlled final image is what the public see, but there’s this huge run up to that final place where it is a fucking mess. There are these crazy ideas being pitched by absolutely insane people who have no idea who you are as an artist. Brands will enter the room and be suggesting these absolutely bonkers concepts. You kind of think, ‘How did this even get this way far up the chain?’”
Charli XCX’s first feature acting credits arrived with three movies last fall, which premiered at various festivals: 100 Nights of Hero, Sacrifice and Erupcja, the lattermost of which she also produced and co-wrote. She’ll next explode on the Park City scene with a fresh trio of films, including supporting roles in the new movies from Cathy Yan (The Gallerist) and Gregg Araki (I Want Your Sex). And she has several others forthcoming — in a wide range of projects, she’s quickly proven how serious she is about this acting business.
The Moment marks her most substantial showcase to date, however. Through this dreamed-up “what if” premise, she gives a surprisingly raw performance. The comedy remains front and center, with Charli delving headfirst into improv under the stewardship of her co-stars Berlant and Demetriou. (“They could really just guide the shit out of it.”) But the fictional narrative ironically allows Charli to get some deeply personal ideas off her chest — the temptations of compromise, the occasional clashes with her label, the ceiling of creative freedom.
The conditions of the production set the stage: Charli filmed a movie about a fictional brat tour co-opted by corporate interests, while winding down her actual brat tour and staring down what might be next. The character says at one point in the movie, “This whole summer, I’ve been dreading the end.”
“It felt very vulnerable because I tapped into the most extreme parts of my personality that sometimes I feel the need to hide and diminish,” Charli says. “Being an artist is a really volatile thing. One minute you can be on top of the world and think you are the best and the most important person in the room with the best ideas — a generational artist — and then the next minute you can feel like a piece of shit on someone’s shoe. I really feel that in my journey as an artist. To actualize that was hard because I don’t like feeling, especially, the latter version of that. It’s scary to admit you feel like that.”
While The Moment is filled with references for Charli followers to appreciate — winking nods to her loyal queer fanbase, the occasional dissection of her lyrics — the Charli character hits on some more generally prescient themes. “We are in this world where everybody is so keen to say, ‘I’m in control. It’s all me.’ I’ve said that and I do believe that, but it’s not always easy for it to be that way — it’s a fight and it’s a battle,” Charli says. “We can all feel sometimes that we have to perform and be someone that we’re not, to be accepted. That is something that I’ve struggled with personally for my entire life.”
The film presents a few foils for the fictional Charli to get this message across. Most centrally, Alexander Skarsgard plays Johannes, an arrogant director known for his work on concert docs for major pop stars. He’s brought in to helm the brat movie and promptly overhauls the tour. When asked about what inspired the character, Zamiri and Charli both giggle, with the latter saying knowingly, “He’s not based on a real guy!”
Charli then clarifies: “We’ve met this person so many times. He is a classic guy who thinks he gets it, but he just fucking doesn’t… He knows how to commodify and sell a product, but it’s under this guise of creativity.”
There’s also a key scene between Charli and Kylie Jenner, also playing a bizarro version of herself with some barbed self-awareness. “It’s one of my favorite scenes in the film,” Charli says. “And she has one of the best lines in the film: ‘The second people start to get sick of you is when you have to go even harder.’” For Zamiri, seeing performers like Sennott and Jenner embrace The Moment’s unvarnished quality proved crucial. “Especially in a time where there are audiences that can’t necessarily separate a character from a person — and when you’re doing something so complicated — that willingness to poke fun at themselves was extremely brave,” he says. “It means that the jokes land harder. The whole thing feels so much more lived in.”
This was a goal rooted not merely in Charli’s own experiences and sensibility, but also her influences. Any fan of Charli’s surely knows her Letterboxd lore and cinephilic bona fides. Sure enough, she and Zamiri came into The Moment armed with clear reference points. “It would be pretty impossible for this film to exist without This Is Spinal Tap — that was a big thing for us,” Charli says of the landmark feature debut by the late Rob Reiner. From there, she lists off quite the spread: John Cassavetes’s Opening Night, the work of Ruben Östlund, the Rolling Stones tour movie Cocksucker Blues and other ‘70s music documentaries.
But the hardest thing to nail — the aspect they couldn’t quite figure out until that first day filming with Sennott — was the tone. It’s where Zamiri argues they took their biggest swing and made their strongest statement. “We wanted to combine this humor based in not quite saying what you mean all the time, which is extremely British of us, with visuals that felt fresh and arresting and exciting,” he says. “Often people say that comedy doesn’t thrive well when it’s cool or there’s music or whatever. We wanted to find a mix of genres where it’s hopefully funny, hopefully emotional — and also looks cool.”
