Another day, another movie about a cultural movement I feel entirely oblivious to! I might be an “old dork,” but I can’t really say I take pride in how oblivious I am to Charli XCX. I’m ignorant of countless trends that dominate the zeitgeist; I’m just typically so detached from what’s currently popular that I don’t learn about them until months or years later. I remember brat coming out! And I remember “brat summer” was just about…being naughty? And wearing bright green? Given my ignorance of brat, I thought witnessing The Moment would help enlighten me, and, while it did to some degree, I was mostly just given an attempt at satire that just satirized everything but what brat ultimately was, despite delivering a handful of laughs.

Starring Charli XCX as herself, The Moment follows the events of “brat summer,” in which the singer, the album, and the lifestyle permeated all corners of pop culture. With a record company insistent on keeping the momentum going, they push for a brat credit card, a brat concert movie, and many other ways to cash in on the gimmick. Charli, meanwhile, is challenged with attempting to be authentic to herself and the movement, while also understanding the financial obligations she has to the forces that made brat a phenomenon in the first place.

Even with my brat ineptitude, I could see what The Moment was going for: how does an artist navigate a world in which they want to be able to demonstrate their artistic vision while being forced to make compromises with the powers that be? This is far from the first movie to attempt to explore these ideas, and in a world where Taylor Swift offers multiple different documentaries about how difficult it is to be her, The Moment is a welcome relief. No, record companies don’t know what the hell to do with artists, and yes, film directors trying to sanitize an artist to make a movie that appeals to the lowest common denominator is embarrassing.

Apparently Charli has previously hosted Saturday Night Live and people liked it! Having seen other pop stars like Ariana Grande or Sabrina Carpenter similarly host the program and not particularly impressing me, Charli managed to deliver the necessary on-screen presence to keep me invested in The Moment. Helping Charli was the fact that she surrounded herself with other talented, funny actors like Kate Berlant, Jamie Demetriou, and Alexander Skarsgård, so there’s some genuinely funny exchanges scattered throughout the picture, some of which Charli takes part in herself.

What’s troubling about this mockumentary is that, while it goes to great lengths to lambast corporate culture and satirize the record industry, Charli is playing a version of herself that comes across as too authentic. From the opening scenes, the tone of The Moment feels like it is just “Everyone Is Annoying to Charli XCX and She Is Perfect.” Some montages poke fun at brat becoming an unexpected phenomenon, yet there’s no real glimpse of Charli owning up to the absurdity of it all. A mockumentary like This Is Spinal Tap works because, while making fun of the record industry, it also mocks its (fictional) subjects, while even something like Spice World manages to heighten the characteristics of real-life characters for a ludicrous narrative. Charli, meanwhile, is just depicted as getting frustrated by annoying people and annoying tasks, and while I don’t know her personally (shockingly), she feels too real for the tone of the rest of the movie.

As the story progresses and the tensions of trying to honor her artistic vision while making her record label happy come to a head, we do get a sequence in which Charli seems to drop the entire facade of the movie and of her persona to speak seemingly from the heart about brat summer, which only makes everything that built up to this reveal all the more confounding. Not only does it feel jarring to go from an attempt at absurdity to an attempt at authenticity, but this on-camera vulnerability doesn’t feel at all earned. Had we seen Charli play a heightened version of herself that wasn’t afraid to mock the movement she intentionally or unintentionally created, culminating in a more vulnerable admission, it could have felt earned. Instead, we get a movie where Charli is irritated by all the annoying people in her life while failing to poke fun at herself in any substantial way, leading to an admission that it’s hard to be an artist who wants to be more than a gimmick created for a three-month stretch.

The Moment feels both self-indulgent and lacking in any self-awareness, being both too absurd and too authentic at the same time. While it’s possible that this was an attempt at being a meta concert documentary, one forced upon Charli by real-world figures, and that this was a cheat to be able to honor those agreements while also honoring her own sense of humor, it conceptually makes more sense, though still fails in execution. Watching The Moment, I couldn’t help but be reminded of HBO’s The Idol, a TV series many described as a vanity project for The Weeknd, which somewhat mocked the record industry while The Weeknd played a musical visionary assisting an up-and-coming pop star who never shied away from controversy. With The Moment, Charli XCX feels like she’s playing both the prescient visionary and the pop star. The self-seriousness of the HBO series – and its many other failings – was deservedly lambasted by critics, while The Moment feels like it’s pulling off the ultimate act of deception by tricking audiences into thinking this isn’t a self-indulgent exhibition of how hard it is to be a creative genius.

Going into The Moment and knowing the bare minimum about brat, I don’t feel like I have much more of an understanding of it. I do know, however, that Charli XCX clearly has good taste, based on the actors she surrounded herself with, and she managed to hold her own against them as a performer. Outside of that, though, the movie is both too serious and too absurd to adequately get across any substantial message about what she stands for as an artist. Or maybe this movie is brat and I’m just too old!

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