Charli XCX Gives Sundance Its ‘This Is Spinal Brat’

“It’s the end of an era,” Charli XCX said, standing in front of a sold out crowd Friday night at the Eccles Theater in Park City, Utah. The pop star-turned-actor had no less than three films set to play at Sundance — itself celebrating the end of an era, with this being film festival’s final edition at its longtime home base in the ski-resort town. But this was the screening that everybody had been buzzing about all week, the hottest ticket to nab, the premiere that was causing a scene outside the fest’s biggest venue.

Charli XCX was here to unveil The Moment, the mysterious A24 project she’d been teasing for the last year that had been described as a “tour mockumentary,” a “2024 period piece,” a month in the life of a world-conquering icon, and a horror movie. This dizzying look at pop stardom from inside the eye of the storm is all of those things, though creative collaborator and the film’s director Aidan Zamiri put it best when he described The Moment as what might have happened if she’d made “entirely different choices” around the phenomenon known as “Brat Summer.”

You remember Brat Summer, right? It started with the release of Charli’s sixth album Brat in June of 2024, which took her signature party-girl-going-hard-at-the-club style of hyperpop and parlayed it into a collection of songs brimming with head-nodding beats, hot namedrops, and the sort of hangover-fueled anxiety that hits you like the first rays of next-morning sunlight. It ended with the record cover’s “puke green” color being inescapable, a killer concert tour, the most quotable political endorsements in ages, and Charli morphing into one of the hugest superstars on the planet. The word became synonymous with a certain type of empowering fuck-it attitude, with the British singer being its prime ambassador. People, products, presidential candidates — being called brat became the ultimate coronation of cool. If you had to ask if you were brat, you most assuredly were not brat.

A lot of people approached Charli about filming a concert movie that following autumn, partially to chronicle the electric live show that she’d taken around the globe and partially to extend the Brat Summer phenomenon as long as possible. The musician had a different idea. As Zamiri told Variety, Charli’s response to the idea of documenting her tour was “the opposite of what I’ve tried to do with ‘Brat’… [a concert film] feels like the expected route of capitalizing on something which has been successful, whereas the bigger swing would be to take a format like that and disrupt it.”

If nothing else, The Moment most definitely does that. A collaboration between the pop star, Zamiri (who’d shot her videos for “360” and “Guess”), and his writing partner Bertie Brandes, this woozy take on what it was like to have been in the middle of it all kicks off with a montage that brings you right back to Brat Summer. Then it drops you in September of 2024, with Charli being told by her label head (Rosanna Arquette, doing a bang-up impersonation of a shark in human form) that this thing they’ve got here? It’s minting money. Why just limit it to a summer? Let’s make Brat Forever. “It’s a bit cringe, isn’t it?” Charli says, right after she’s recorded some Brat-centric radio promos. “It’s all cringe,” her assistant (Isaac Powell) says, before making her do another take.

The solution to eternal brat-itude, in the eyes of the suits, is to bring in the hottest It director of the moment to capture it all on film. He’s Johannes Godwin, a tall enfant terrible of cinema, and living proof that no contemporary working actor plays assholes better than Alexander Skarsgard. Neither Charli nor her creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates) want to work with this passive-aggressive prick of an auteur, but they’ve been overruled by the powers that be. Johannes insists on sitting in on the rehearsals for the next leg of the tour. He “loves” everything they’re doing. But as he’s directing the concert film, Johannes has a suggestion about how they can “improve” the experience for the fans. One note turns into several. Which turns into a dozen changes. Which quickly becomes a complete redesign of everything from stage props — 100-foot long giant cigarettes! The word “BITC#” spelled out in lights! — to a whole new, “less vomity” shade of Brat green. Soon, Charli is less a participant in her tour, and her life in general, than a second-hand observer.

During the postscreening Q&A, festival director Eugene Hernandez made a reference to someone describing The Moment as “This Is Spinal Brat.” And like everything that falls under the category of mockumentary, the shadow of the late, great Rob Reiner‘s gamechanging movie hangs over this faux-doc on the agony and XCX-stasy of being Charli. Zamiri also mentioned the influence of British comedy on the project, which is why Jamie Demetriou ends up being the stealth MVP; if you’ve seen Stath Lets Flats or any of the gajillion other things he’s graced, then you can imagine what Demetriou does with the character of an incompetent tour manager. We’d argue that Larry David is an even bigger patron saint to Zamiri’s pop-mythology puncturing here, given that so many scenes feel like improvisations between Charli and various lackeys, flunkies, executives, creative collaborators, control freaks, and fellow celebrities like Rachel Sennott and Kylie Jenner. All of these exchanges inevitably end in some sort of cringe-comedic stalemate. Brat Your Enthusiasm might be a superior alt-title.

The Moment starts off as a recognizable satire of everything that goes along with being the world’s biggest pop star, from freaked-out selfie-demanding fans to parasitic hangers-on to money-grubbing industry types. “I’ve met different versions of all of the characters within this film,” Charli noted at the Q&A. “I’ve met [folks] who are rotting for you, riding for you even if you are an arsehole. I’ve met people who are in it to be close to the artist. I’ve met people who are like, ‘We totally get you!’ — and they really don’t… I’ve had a lot of practice reacting to those kinds of characters in my real life.” If anything, you wish the movie leaned in harder to the 360-degree ridiculousness of the world around the “360” superstar. It’s hard to parody something that’s already so over-the-top, yet you feel like this is just scratching the surface of the nonstop mayhem that’s part of any world tour centered around a hedonistic yet sensitive pop star surrounded by industry sharks and suck-ups.

What Zamiri and Charli have really cooked up, however, is a horror film about what would happen if your pop dreams — the ones you’ve spent a decade working to achieve — and the whole thing turns into a waking nightmare. It ends on what can only be described as a delirious, sweaty-palmed what-if scenario that doubles as an epic act of trolling. (You know how there may have been some beef between her and, say, another massive musical star with a successful tour? Let’s just say shots get fired here.) More than anything, The Moment wants to put out one last word on the whole Brat phenomenon, or maybe a stake through the whole thing’s heart. Charli turned the term into a brand. Now she is ready to move on.

“I’m really wanting Brat to stop, and actually sort of really pivot away from it as far away as possible,” Charli declared, with a slightly nervous giggle. “It’s not because I don’t love it. It’s just that as artists, you wanna challenge yourself… totally switch the creative soup you’re in, and live in a different bowl for a while.”