Charli XCX’s The Moment forces us to ask the question, “Well, when?” The film is a “2024 period piece” set during an alternate version of brat summer, Charli told Vanity Fair in an October 14 cover story. The mockumentary follows a fake version of her life as she toured, went to Storm King, created political discourse, and worked it out on the remix with Lorde. The director, Aidan Zamiri, who previously collaborated with Charli on her music videos for “Guess” and “360,” describes it as being if Charli made “entirely different choices” during the Brat era. “It’s not a tour documentary or a concert film in any way, but the seed of the idea was conceived from this idea of being pressured to make one,” Charli said. “It’s fiction, but it’s the realest depiction of the music industry that I’ve ever seen.”
The idea for The Moment started as a voice memo Charli sent to Zamiri while on tour. “It almost felt like a diary entry of, ‘This is how I feel right now,’” Zamiri told VF, seemingly unaware that he’d just arrived independently at the title of Charli’s 2020 album, How I’m Feeling Now. “This feeling of having just almost got everything she could have wanted, and what that felt like on kind of a human level.” Zamiri and Bertie Brandes then wrote the screenplay based on Charli’s voice memo, with her giving notes as she continued to tour the record — living in The Moment. “I always find it hard to sit down and look at things with distance, because I am always moving on to the next thing,” she recalled. “I think that I process myself through my work. I’m writing about myself and my thoughts all the time, and my thoughts about what people think about me. The meta-ness continues.”
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Alongside Rachel Sennott, Kylie Jenner, Kate Berlant, and more, Alexander Skarsgård, fresh off playing a queer leather dom in Pillion, will star as the documentarian who “the record label convinces Charli is the hottest director out there at the moment; the right person to capture the essence of Charli XCX and get the most out of this phenomenon.” Functionally, that makes him “one of the villains or antagonists of the film,” per Zamiri, though that doesn’t make Charli the hero. The pop star says she’s playing “sort of a hell version of myself.” Overcompensating was just practice.
