A movie I thought would be brat—messy, loud, brash—instead, left me leaving the theatre holding back tears.
Charli XCX’s award-winning album brat took over summer 2024, becoming not just an album, but a portrait of chaotic, party girl life. Charli XCX returns to the spotlight with The Moment (2025), a film marketed as a mockumentary that satirizes her preparations for the brat tour. Instead, the movie delivered a horrific portrayal of the emotional and creative cost of maintaining fame and fitting in. The Moment reminds viewers how art and commerce are always at odds, with artists often paying the price, losing their true visions along the way.
Exciting cameos from Rachel Sennott and Kylie Jenner, clips of Charli dancing at the club, and corny blow-up decorations of cigarettes are fun, but deliberately hollow. Instead, the film was about the struggle of drowning out the industry noise to prioritize the true sound that the artist is looking for.
For Charli, brat is authentic, on the surface, diving into her experience with nightclubs, partying, cocaine, and chaos. Many people appreciated how, in the online world that’s drowning in “clean girl” propaganda, the album comes through as a representation for women’s wild, party sides that are often excluded from mainstream music and art. But even this ideaCharli complicates.
The film follows Charli’s journey once the album takes off. All of a sudden, everyone seems to have something to say about her brand, wanting to bend and shape it to reach the largest family-friendly audience to make the most money possible.
Charli begins to lose herself to passivity, wanting to run away to Ibiza and leave it to Celeste, her creative director, played by Hailey Gates, to defend her creative vision alone. She must do so in the face of blatant misogyny and ignorance from the fictional documentary film director Johannes, played by Alexander Skarsgard.
Through The Moment, the internet’s favourite cool girl is humanized. She’s often barefaced, with sunglasses on, angrily puffing at a cigarette, looking to others for a voice and staring out the window in an aggravated fog. Towards the end of the film, she breaks down in a voice memo to Celeste, saying, “I know it’s not chic to be the last person at a party, but I just hate going home.”
She reshapes the idea of “the party” as not only a space of liberation, but also a moment of avoidance.
Charli uses The Moment to show that brat doesn’t have a one-dimensional view of these ideas of drinking, clubbing, and partying. Despite being full of club classics, as an artist, Charli’s proven to be full of depth— embracing her vulnerability as well as her erratic and wild side.
She uses the film to be in on the jokes, leaving viewers wondering how much is fact and how much is fiction.
“I knew I needed to kill ‘brat’ one day, so this is me killing it,” Charli says towards the end of the film. Well, safe to say, brat was a bright shining star, but even stars fade.
Tags
brat, brat summer, Charli XCX, Film, The Moment
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