Four compressed lowercase letters with noisy digital optics, centered on an aggressive acid green background: That's all it took in 2024 to usher in the pop culture phenomenon of the year – the so-called Brat Summer. The cover of “Brat” (in German: “Brat”), the sixth studio album by the British musician Charli In addition, there was the album itself, which sanded down the edge of Charli's pop designs, which had previously prevented her from becoming a global superstar, just enough so that her songs, which ranged between club music and hyperpop, were able to radiate far into the mainstream.
Last but not least, “Brat” was a radical and striking counter-proposal to all other movements of pop modernity: self-confident and feminist, but far away from any superior girl boss pose; vulnerable, but without pathos, imperfect, but without the claim to compensatory self-optimization, hedonistic, but never succumbing to pure escapism. A 365 party girl also struggles with (self-)doubts of all kinds. But even if the party is a coping mechanism, it can be fun for its own sake – no morals follow from the inevitable hangover. This game of contradictions and gaps combined with the glamorous messiness of the “Brat” aesthetic became the ideal resonance body in the midst of a zeitgeist between post-corona rigidity and late capitalist performance dictates.
After the big moment
But in the end, parties are like trends: at some point they have to end. This is where the meta-mockumentary “The Moment” comes in, Charli XCX’s self-developed film based on the “Brat” hype. What happens when you not only move from the edges of pop to its center, but also become one yourself – at least for a summer? What follows the great moment that may be delayed but will certainly never be repeated? And how much willingness to compromise and self-sacrifice are necessary in order to survive in the exploitation machine of the global pop industry?
“The Moment” goes straight into the audiovisual attack: strobe lights flicker relentlessly to the cutting, industrial synth riffs of the “365” remix with Shygirl. The images flashing out of the darkness could be from a music video or footage from a club night that's clearly past its prime – when we first see Charli XCX, she's crawling on the floor, saliva flowing from her mouth. The opening credits remain true to this pulse, the names are thrown at the audience at high frequency and in colorful neon letters, like the LSD-induced bubblegum version of a Gaspar Noé film. Afterwards, a flashy montage of TV reports and video snippets, which gives a brief overview of how “Brat” became a major event that sets the tone and creates identity, must be sufficient as context.
Even in her private life, pop star Charli XCX always wears her iconic sunglasses.
The music mockumentary, apparently intended as a kind of “This Is Spinal Tap” for the post-digital age, is consistently thought from the inside – anyone who didn't experience Brat Summer could quickly feel lost. The action of “The Moment” – staged by Aidan Zamiri, one of the visual architects of the “Brat” era – begins around three months after the album’s release, and preparations for Charli’s world tour are in full swing. While “Brat” has only just begun its triumphal march, the estate is already being managed.
An armada of successful music industry archetypes (including a tyrannical label boss embodied by Rosanna Arquette) confer in glass back rooms about how a fleeting zeitgeist moment can be turned into a brand that works in the long term. One of the building blocks: Charli is supposed to be accompanied on her shows for an Amazon series by the director Johannes, who specializes in concert films – played by “True Blood” star Alexander Skarsgård, who seems to be in his own film with a silly beanie and comedic exuberance.
The director he brought in absolutely doesn't understand what makes “Brat” so appealing – and so his attempts to expand the primarily young, queer, internet-savvy and party-loving fan base to include the whole family quickly lead to absurd results that lead to many a successful punch line. The cocaine in Charli's lyrics is probably meant metaphorically, right? “What is metaphorical coke?” asks Charli’s creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates).
The glass of Aperol Spritz is an essential “roast” accessory.
Charli plays a kind of alternative version of herself here, and reality and fiction flow seamlessly into one another. This already becomes clear during an appearance on Stephen Colbert's Late Show, which Charlis quickly exposes as fictitious within a question of acting that switches from naturalistic-casual to strategic-affected. The “Brat” credit card, which will later play a major role in “The Moment,” actually existed. In reality, however, the marketing stunt did not result in a scandal that would tarnish the singer's public integrity, which disappointed popular YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano to reduce his “Brat” rating from 10 to 3.
Fortunately, “The Moment” has little interest in maintaining its pseudo-documentary character, which initially seems a bit counterintuitive. The camera is always where it is most needed narratively, and the fact that it is directed by Sean Price Williams, who has already given his nervous vibrato to several of the Safdie brothers' directorial works (including “Good Time”), puts it stylistically closer to the stress film genre that is currently omnipresent in US independent cinema.
On the trail of The Weeknd
More than “This Is Spinal Tap”, Rob Reiner's great rock mockumentary classic from 1984, “The Moment” connects with “Hurry Up Tomorrow”, last year's film by The Weeknd, which the Canadian R'n'B superstar designed as a kind of mixture of navel-gazing and self-exorcism. Charli
At the same time, “The Moment” is undoubtedly an ego project – you have to be able to afford to spend more than 100 minutes of film telling what it's like to have to mediate between your own artistic ideas and external role expectations (in short: to be in the shoes of a pop star). In contrast to their songs, there are moments that border on the annoying.
Charli (left) is increasingly torn between artistic integrity and commercial imperatives.
The central what-if scenario has something of a straw man, after all, the film has to make strong exaggerations in order to formulate its rather broad criticism of the music business and the pressure to commercialize it – while “The Moment”, as a hip A24 production that Charli put together with her friends, is more of an expression of smartly curated image cultivation. But pop, of course, thrives not least on self-reference, performance and coquetry – and it's not uncharming how much the film believes in every single idea, both the brilliant and the half-baked. In its chaotic form, characterized by changes in mood and breaks in style, it is also quite coherent as a screen extension of the “Brat” era.
At the 2025 concerts of her tour, Charli The “Brat” credit card is no longer covered, a Charli mannequin falls to the ground with a loud thunder, and the songs that have long since become iconic soon find their way into the film only as fragmented noise. In reality, Charli has already come a step further – with the soundtrack to “Wuthering Heights”, the follow-up project to “Brat” is being released parallel to the theatrical release of “The Moment”.
Conclusion: Charli They should discover a lot for themselves in the mockumentary, while the rest can at least have fun with Alexander Skarsgård's exaggerated comedy performance.