The day I graduated high school, I jolted awake at 6 in the morning. Makes sense, right? Pre-graduation jitters, a landmark in my life, et cetera, et cetera. No, I jolted awake feeling sorry that I postponed listening to Charli xcx’s freshly released Brat to the morning. My headphones were on before I even properly rubbed my eyes.
Fast forward a year and a half to January 2026, and I am maniacally checking movie showtimes for The Moment on any off chance I get, trying to find anywhere remotely nearby I can see the limited-release Brat mockumentary. I finally find a showing an hour and a half away at the Pittsburgh-area AMC Waterfront, and I promptly assemble a crew to drive three hours round-trip for a 103-minute movie. Later that week, I struck up a conversation about weekend cool-down plans, with one plan being a showing of The Moment at AMC Morgantown. I could have just waited a week. Like my sense of urgency for all things Charli xcx, some things never change.
The Moment is a 2026 film directed by Aidan Zamiri, longtime music video director and photographer for Charli xcx, Billie Eilish, and Caroline Polachek, based on an original idea by Charli xcx. Preemptively dubbed as “Spinal Brat,” The Moment takes us into the imagined world of what Charli xcx experienced after Brat, a commercially inaccessible album made with only the fans and herself in mind, accidentally became the mainstream success she had been seeking for over a decade. Now, Charli (the character) has to balance her creative expressions with calculated music industry moves. The central question asked: How far would you go to capitalize on “the moment?”
To no one’s surprise, fork found in kitchen, I thought The Moment was a slam dunk. I realize I am incredibly biased, as I am the EXACT target audience: a Charli xcx megafan who watched Brat become a cultural phenomenon in real time with aspirations to work in the music industry. I can’t believe one of my takeaways was “yup, this is exactly what I want to do in my career.” It’s like The Bear for musician creative directors.
For one, even just the concept of The Moment is shockingly refreshing. What a cool move. You don’t just make a mockumentary starring fictionalized versions of yourself and your circle. Of course, this works for Charli, where the opening track to Brat is essentially “look how cool my friends and I are.” The cameos are so much fun: Rachel Sennott up for Best Supporting Actress for merely saying “delete this,” A.G. Cook and Shygirl in the club, Anthony Fantano and The Swiftologist in the stereotypical “the protagonist is famous” opening montage, and Kylie Jenner surprisingly pieced in the puzzle during a pivotal scene.
Out of all the truly fictional characters in The Moment, all of which are amazing, there are two worth highlighting. Alexander Skarsgård’s Johannes Godwin is an established concert film director tasked with filming the Brat tour live and technically the “villain” of the movie. Everything about Johannes is funny; there was a point where he entered rehearsals wearing a shirt with the craziest neckline I have ever seen, and I actually started belly laughing in the quiet theater. As well as he means, he misunderstands just about everything about Brat and upends the vision of the tour, pushing for light-up wristbands over club lights and putting bright green hair extensions in Charli’s hair.
On the other end of this is Celeste, played by Hailey Benton Gates (who has a nonzero chance of being a character actress in your favorite movie). Celeste is Charli’s creative director and partner-in-crime for what made Brat “the moment,” even pitching some things viewers might recognize from the real Brat tour. She serves as the straight woman in the craziness of The Moment, firmly standing for Charli’s creative expression and standing by her side as a friend.
Celeste’s character is what makes The Moment’s strongest moment, its ending, what it is. After bankrupting a financial institution (yes, this somehow happens in this movie), Charli is at a crossroads to rehabilitate her image and the tour and decides to let Brat live on forever as Johannes intended, firing Celeste. The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” plays as Charli apologizes to Celeste via voice note, and then we see the re-imagined Brat tour. An Amazon Music original, the “BRAT: Live” concert film is now an at-home experience for the whole family, complete with backup dancers, fan interaction, confetti, and light-up wristbands.
Fans were quick to name names, but the ending of The Moment has stuck with me beyond the names. It’s a humorous and genuinely critical look into what made Brat “the moment.” For fans like me, Brat’s appeal is in its singularity. The album was made as the culmination of Charli’s pop universe, somewhere between the experimental and the mainstream. Its resounding success may feel like an accident, even to Charli herself. However, this was far from an accident, instead going to show how important it is to have people redefining the norms in music, especially as it feels more and more stagnant.
The Moment isn’t a hit piece against mainstream stars like people are projecting; there’s nothing wrong with a light-up wristband or “Juno” arrest viral moment. It instead looks at whether “the moment” is ever worth stopping, if relevance is worth sacrificing. The Moment is this concept exaggerated to its highest degree, as realistically as a “2024 period piece” (coined by Charli) of colorful lights and topical celebrities can be. It asked me to define what a breaking point can be in my career, in my fan behavior, in my everyday interactions.
That breaking point, evidently, is not a 90-minute drive.