Sundance 2026 Review: THE MOMENT, Surface-Deep Charlie XCX Mockumentary

Charli XCX’s meteoric rise as a mega-pop-star has been anything but meteoric.

 

It’s been a slow, upward descent, from posting videos on a long-defunct social-media platform, MySpace, in 2008 at the age of sixteen, to signing with a record label two years later, followed by mixtapes, collabs, and ultimately, a series of albums, each one bigger than the last, culminating with the 14-track album, “brat,” two years ago and the subsequent social media frenzy that turned Charli XCX into a worldwide pop-cultural phenemenon.

 

That might as well have been a decade ago and the late, lamented summer of 2024. Since then, “brat summer” has congealed into a rapidly fading pop-cultural, vaguely remembered collective memory.

 

For “Charlie XCX,” the lightly tweaked iteration of the British mega-pop-star in writer-director Aidan Zamiri’s over-familiar mockumentary, The Moment, however, “brat summer” didn’t end in the summer of 2024. It never ended. And it might just never end. Note: As with all things, it should have ended and did, in fact, end.

 

The Moment takes its structure from every behind-the-scenes/making-of documentary, centering itself on Charlie XCX as she faces the trials and tribulations of mega-stardom while planning her upcoming arena tour in support of the “brat” album. With the usual hangers-on, mostly useless except to promote themselves and their products or hype up Charli XCX, and few friends deserving of the term, except Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), Charli XCX’s creative designer, Charli XCX faces familiar challenges, pulled in different, conflicting directions, specifically a record label executive, Tammy (Rosanna Arquette), her brand-obsessed manager, Tim (Jamie Demetriou), and a concert documentary filmmaker, Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård).

 

As portrayed by Skarsgård, the cartoonishly self-centered Johannes especially proves himself a particularly noxious thorn in her side. Pushing Charli XCX to adopt a more family-friendly attitude and approach, Johannes gradually takes over Celeste’s role, eventually pushing Charli XCX’s onetime friend, confidante, and creative partner to the margins.

 

Meanwhile, Charli XCX, floundering under the weight of unrealistic expectations and the voracious demand for her time from label executives, brand sponsors, including an ill-conceived “brat” credit card, and super-fans, starts to eye the exits, if only temporarily. 

 

Notwithstanding the fictionalized Charli XCX’s ambiguous descent into artistic compromise and creative dissolution, The Moment gives its most villainous, anti-art moments to Johannes, a middling talent over-impressed with his own opinion, a corporate tool who blindly considers himself a “true artist,” and ultimately, the biggest obstacle to Charli XCX’s reaching her creative potential as a concert performer. All of his ideas are stale (one comes directly from Coldplay's outdated arena performances), unoriginal, or plainly the output of a mediocre mind. He’s also, at least in this telling, exactly what the so-called captains of industry and their unrelenting demands for corporate commercialization from musical artists of Charli XCX’s stature.

 

As Charli XCX 2.0, Charli XCX 1.0 proves herself an unsurprisingly deft, capable performer. Playing the meta-game several levels deep, Charli XCX acquits herself well, delivering a finely grained, easily believable performance as a mega-pop-star teetering toward self-implosion. Whether she can break away from her Charli XCX persona or not remains an open question, but if her small, if no less hilarious turn as a frustrated medical student in Gregg Araki’s latest subversive sex comedy, I Want Your Sex, is any indication, she might have a long, fruitful career as an onscreen performer, too.    

 

For all of Zamiri’s flash and sizzle, though, The Moment never rises above a formulaic, surface-deep satire of the music industry and its suppression of artistic expression and creativity. Encounters with hyper-exaggerated versions of Rachel Sennott in a nightclub and Kylie Jenner add little beyond underlining that the lives of the wealthy, shallow, image-conscious elite are nothing like our own. 

 

Even more disappointingly, The Moment barely includes any of Charli XCX’s music from “brat” or from any of her earlier albums. We only get a few snippets, often interrupted or cut short by whatever else is going on onscreen.

 

It’s a definite missed opportunity, one among many, to showcase what makes Charli XCX not just a pop diva, but a culture-redefining mega-pop-star. 

 

The Moment premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is now playing in select movie theaters, via A24 Films, and will open nationwide on Friday, January 30.