The No No Song
There are spoilers ahead. Stop reading if that sort of thing matters to you.
The Moment, a punchy, successful, anxiety-fantasy starring Charli XCX, features a thematically relevant amount of cocaine use. Ms. XCX references the drug in song lyrics, of course, with a casual approach that reminds me of the one time I saw actual cocaine just hanging out on a dessert plate at a friend's birthday party. Message: Don't make a big deal about this. I thought I was going to prison just from looking at it.
It was the second cocaine-adjacent film of the week for me, along with a rewatch of 1999's Cruel Intentions, in which vicious teen manipulator Sarah Michelle Gellar wears a little crucifix necklace that's a not-at-all-secret cocaine vial. The movie ends with The Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony" playing over SMG's epic comeuppance, as she faces punishment for the relentless cruelty and the endless cocaine. The Moment drops "Bitter Sweet Symphony" into its own finale (the song does, in fact, figure into the presentation of the actual Brat tour) and pulls the rug out from under what ought to be a happy ending. As in Cruel Intentions, we get the soundtrack to a consequence.
The Moment opens rambunctiously enough, no warning clouds on the horizon, with The Verve's tonal opposite, the "365" remix of Brat's lead song, "360," its Altern 8 "Frequency" sample (more 90s, uncoincidentally) blasting itself into your face amidst a barrage of strobing, day-glo imagery. The sequence aggressively announces the film for an audience who like to keep their phones on in the theater and watch videos at the same time the movie is playing, eat Sour Patch Kids for supper, and wear half-shirts that say, "Lexapro," and "CVNT."
But it's a trick. Ostensibly a comedy about the chaotic creative process of building XCX's Brat world tour, The Moment unravels its subject as the clock ticks down toward opening night and the record label's desperate determination to maintain "brat" as a marketing device crashes directly into an exhausted, uncertain artist.
Of course, nothing is real here. Charli XCX plays a vulnerable, disassociated "Charli XCX" alongside celebrities appearing as fictionalized versions of themselves (Rachel Sennott, Julia Fox) and well-known actors playing people on the XCX tour-management-and-documentation team (Roseanna Arquette, Alexander Skarsgård). All the usual mockumentary signposts are here: a pop persona flipped upside down, famous people poking fun at their established brands, sly cameos from people like Interview's Mel Ottenberg, and cultural trends thrown into a dumpster and left for raccoons to eat.
XCX prepares for the tour's launch, running into interference from all sides: the record label and its attendant do-nothing employees, as well as a very specifically meddling documentary filmmaker. Brat, by the way, if you’re not tuned into club music and/or not a member of the queer community, was XCX's sixth studio album but also a breakthrough, resonating strongly with her core audience while delivering her into the mainstream. And when the mainstream gets hold of you, especially if your cultural presence is one aligned with unbridled hedonism, you might find yourself facing down the end of the party.
Skarsgård is the smiling villain, Johannes, a hack director brought in to make a concert film. Johannes passively bullies the entire team into his way of thinking as he makes incremental demands for the Brat experience to tone down its aggressively clubby atmosphere into a more "family-friendly" night out with the kids. His interactions with creative director Celeste (filmmaker Hailey Gates), the only person who's got Charli's back, are among the film's most memorable sequences: Gen X know-it-all–ism meets icy Millennial dead-inside responses in a battle to the death, as Celeste rolls her eyes at Johannes' objections to all those drugs and informs him that the people buying tickets to the show are "just not that interested in having children."
Meanwhile, this version of XCX is agitated and stressed, not even saying "yes" to the bad ideas pummeling her, just not saying much at all in her own defense. (As opposed to the real person who seems completely in control of her artistic direction; one doesn't get to this level of career success by allowing oneself to be pushed around.) She's so fueled by insecurity that a random encounter with Kylie Jenner can prompt very bad decisions at the worst possible moment.
There's a scene in 1954's A Star Is Born where studio executives send Judy Garland to hair and makeup so that she becomes palatable enough for the public to look at. As people poke and prod her face, hammering her looks and convincing her they're right about everything ("My nose is very bad!"), James Mason intervenes and demands that she stay as she is. Anyone trying to save "Charli" in this way gets frozen out.
It’s an amusing sort of bleak, made sandpaper-rough by director Aidan Zamiri's and cinematographer Sean Price Williams' dark palette and atmosphere of grubby glamour, appropriate for a story of an artist courting her own erasure alongside the very forces that sell her to the public in the first place. Its spikiest conceit involves an acid green Brat credit card aimed at young queer consumers – an entertaining bit that also eludes a satisfying narrative trajectory – but it's less interested in mocking its target demo than skewering the process of building fake cultural rebellion inside a corporate framework.
And the music? There's not much of it. The Moment tellingly contains very little of Charli XCX's actual catalog, in spite of that brief jolt over the opening credits, fitting for a story about an incredible shrinking woman. And where other films might provide the lift of a triumphant opening night for its exhausted star, here The Verve shows up again. Whatever purpose the song served on the real Brat tour is inverted.
"Charli XCX" is dancing. Her mouth is moving. We can tell she's singing a song, but all we hear is something bittersweet.
