Sam Rosenberg’s monthly column CineMusic highlights newly released film scores, soundtracks, and the composers/curators behind them. Minor spoilers for The moment below.
At one point during my watchthrough of The moment, Charli XCX’s mockumentary about the cultural phenomenon behind brat, it dawned on me that there was barely any music in the film. Helmed by Charli’s go-to music video director Aidan Zamiri, The moment offers a fictionalized glimpse into the British superstar’s whirlwind ascent from a niche-yet-beloved musician to a zeitgeist-defining artist unequipped to handle her newfound virality. Despite the movie technically being about brat’s influence, it features only three songs from the album. AG Cook’s score, which fluctuates from glitchy and thundering to airy and ambient, is also barely there, charging in during the film’s more intense scenes but appearing faintly in the background for the most part. Interestingly, the most prominent and impactful sonic element of The moment is its sound design: Clicks, whooshes, dings, and buzzes dominate the busiest scenes, demonstrating how the omnipresence of technology has diluted the creative process into an obsession with optics.
The decision to downplay the music seems to reflect Charli’s boredom with and discomfort around her own creations, an attitude she’s espoused a couple times in real life, and perhaps further emphasize how The moment is less about brat itself and more about the people who try and defang a great piece of art into a branded product. In an age of image sanitization and social media sponcon, this specific kind of cynical take on pop stardom cam be effective if executed well (the HBO Max series The Other Two is perhaps the platonic ideal of this).
Charli’s long history of dealing with industry pressures to conform certainly provides some metatextual insight into The moment. Her constant wrestling with being on the periphery of fame dates all the way back to Sucker, when “Boom Clap,” her most successful song at that time, gave her a leg up—only for her to dwindle back into relative obscurity and pivot toward a more anti-commercial, hyperpop-leaning sound. This idea was also a prominent theme on brat, and having The moment explore an alternate timeline where Charli embraced its commercialization could’ve certainly illuminated more about her difficulty maintaining her unique creative identity in such a cruel, vampiric music business.
But in her effort to be ahead of the criticism and demonstrate her awareness of her own role in prolonging brat past its cultural expiration date, Charli XCX undermines her own argument with The moment by furthering the album’s overexposure despite acting like she’s doing so in a sly and subversive way. Consequently, such self-contradictory “I’m not like other pop stars” posturing renders Charli, Zamiri, and the film’s co-writer Bertie Brandes’s satire on brat’s cultural impact to be quite toothless, one-note, and dishonest.
Even with its many attempts at being tongue-in-cheek, The moment doesn’t have much to say about pop stardom that hasn’t already been said before and dramatized more persuasively. Films like Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Josie & The Pussycats, This is Spinal Tap, Spice World, and Wayne’s World succeeded in nailing their skewering of entertainment industry opportunism, mainly because its creators didn’t have anything to defend or prove. With The moment, Charli unfortunately seems eager to have her cake and eat it too, overly concerned in needing to justify that she’s still cool to her fans despite the fact that she’s now more popular and beholden to corporate interests than ever. But no amount of sleek A24 packaging or celebrity cameos (for instance: alt-comedy divas Rachel Sennott and Kate Berlant, Interview’s Mel Ottenberg, and renowned indie DP Sean Price Williams) can disguise The moment’s muddled messaging and self-serious navel-gazing, and such aesthetic flexing ultimately detracts what makes Charli and brat so compelling to begin with.
It’s difficult to say whether or not adding more music would fill in the gaps of the film’s puddle-deep perspective and arthouse veneer, but when The moment does deploy a song or a piece of music score, it either feels too on-the-nose, serves mainly as plot filler, or both. In the film’s strobe-heavy intro, for instance, Charli dances in slo-mo to a rave-like reworking of the “365” remix while a series of brands associated with the production flash on screen. Though the choice appeals on a surface and sensory level, and is clearly intended to poke fun at the heavy product placement featured in the film, presenting the logos in this hyperstylized way doesn’t make its commentary about corporate oversight inherently more scathing.
Later on, Charli performs a quick blocking rehearsal for “Sympathy is a knife,” but it’s merely used as a segue into her meeting with ingratiating tour director Johannes Godwin (a committed Alexander Skarsgard). Charli does eventually cave to Johannes’ narrow-minded, family-friendly vision for her arena tour when she does a deadpan rendition of “I might say something stupid” while hoisted up in the air, dressed head to toe in green like she’s in a Poison Ivy musical as her dismayed team looks on. The track itself is a disarming highlight from brat that meditates on Charli’s discomfort in not fitting in with a celebrity or normal lifestyle, but in the film’s on-the-nose context, the lyrics newly read as frustratingly blunt and obvious. When she coos the line “I don’t know if I belong here anymore” while dangling above the stage wearing horrendous brat-green makeup and a Kidz Bop-esque outfit that doesn’t fit her clubby aesthetic, it just feels overstated and redundant.
Cook’s compositions fare slightly better in articulating the film’s slow-burn chaos—the best part being the slinky, Daft Punk-adjacent instrumental “Offscreen”—but also frequently operate as a crutch in amplifying the emotion behind crucial narrative beats that struggle to evoke any feeling themselves. The frenetic “Fraud,” for example, soundtracks Charli’s crashout after she ventures to an Ibizan spa and encounters Kylie Jenner (doing excellent work in her single-scene cameo), but the lack of clarity around her decision to preemptively post about an advertising deal for a “brat credit card” only makes Cook’s blinking fire-alarm beeps feel all the more forced. Towards the end, the mellow “Depth (Reprise)” plays during a scene where Charli sends a voicemail to her creative director Celeste (Hailey Benson Gates) and bares her soul over how brat has mutated into something she dislikes, but the song’s placid production isn’t quite enough to elevate Charli’s strained attempt at introspection and sincerity.
The song also leads into a needle drop of the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” a massive hit that also catapulted its relatively unknown British makers into the mainstream. It plays over the film’s tragicomic ending, ostensibly meant to cement The moment as a eulogistic sendoff of brat, but the music cue basically acts as an ironic setup to a very silly and lame punchline digging at pop-star sellouts. Charli may be making fun of Taylor Swift’s flashy Eras Tour, as the subtext of the final sequence implies, but her thinking that what she’s doing is much different and much cooler unfortunately has the opposite intended effect, especially since everyone is already in on the joke. If anything, The moment solidifies how Charli’s disaffected hot/cool/it-girl persona has also become an enshittified brand unto itself, one that Charli has actively enabled yet appears disinterested in wanting to fully claim responsibility for. Watch her recent Super Bowl ad and you’ll see what I mean.
The conflict at the heart of The moment is definitely resonant—it’s very human to want to move on from something while being unable to stop talking about it—but as the ominous, funereal, “I Love It”-sampling “Dread” played over the end credits, I walked out of my theater more frustrated by the film’s insistence that its winking self-awareness was enough to preemptively exculpate both it and Charli herself from critique, a feeling that only intensified when I saw a cluster of people in line to be filmed about their thoughts on the movie. Charli XCX always stood out for going against pop-star expectations by constantly refining and reinventing her output and not caring how people felt when she shifted away from her previous work. The moment is possibly the first instance where Charli comes across like every other pop star, satire be damned: desperate to cling onto her momentum and time in the spotlight by mining and milking as much juice out of her work for as long as humanly possible, even when the moment’s already passed.
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find him on Twitter @samiamrosenberg.
