Sponsored content is the backbone and the burden of being a contemporary celebrity. You don’t make money making art anymore, and you can’t make art with integrity because corporate money is what allows you to make it in the first place. During the frenetic opening credits of The Moment—photographer-director Aidan Zamiri’s meta-mockumentary about the height of Charli xcx’s Brat—the names of cool production companies are interspersed with the logos of buzzy brands: Starface, Aperol, and Beats. It’s garish and amazing, like a fuck-you to the subtlety we sacrificed as soon as we stopped paying for music. From there on out, the movie becomes a game of spot-the-spon. These brands appear proudly on or near Charli’s face, each receiving a special thanks in the credits.
The Moment may be our first genuinely smart movie about the machinations of modern fame. Based on an idea by Charli herself, with a script co-written by Zamiri and journalist Bertie Brandes, it’s billed as a “2024 period piece”. The film draws heavily from the situations Charli found herself in as she went from niche pop star beloved by some contingent of gay guys to a full-blown cultural fixture, cited by presidential candidates and meme-ified into oblivion by FTSE 100 food and beverage corporations. What do you do in a situation like that? And once “the culture” claims you, can you really control it?
We meet this lightly fictionalized version of Charli as she steps into tour preparation, swallowed whole by Brat at its peak. As the world catches on and brand opportunities arise, things start happening without her knowledge. She’s been working closely with her creative director, Celeste (played by Hailey Benton Gates), on the visual language of the tour, but the concert-film rights have been sold to Amazon Music. They want Johannes, a stoic Scandi director (Alexander Skarsgård) with tacky ideas—“He invented The Masked Singer!”—to helm it as well.
Meanwhile, the struggling bank Howard Stirling has bought into the Brat branding to launch a credit card “aimed at young queer people,” an attempt to revitalize its image. Even as Charli expresses her cynicism, listening to the endless Ts and Cs and the justifications offered by corporate executives, there’s a dead-eyed, fuck-this-who-cares energy to her performance. In the hands of people who claim to know better, Brat might as well be McDonald’s.
“Is [pop star] a feminist? Is MasterCard a queer ally? Is this tv show my friend?”
Back in 2015, Twitter user @negaversace clocked the way commerce and culture were beginning to blur. Everything had to reflect moral righteousness. The political alignment of your bank mattered. This was a good thing, but it also warped how we thought about goodness itself. Was there such a thing as a morally sound bank? Could a conglomerate ever be slay? In The Moment, Brat becomes the conglomerate, and Charli the artist reckoning with the grotesque way it’s being sold.
There’s a version of this story that paints Charli as a victim of her own success, but even she knows she willingly signed contracts that come with being in the public eye. The Moment wrestles with this tension intelligently, while skewering the very subject that inspired it (“She’s hardly a communist! She has an H&M deal!”). It is fueled by Charli’s desire to toy with culture in a Warholian way. It’s also, crucially, very funny.
Can you pose with a brat-green credit card and still be an arbiter of cool?
That tone pairs nicely with a surprisingly great cameo from one of fame’s most influential modern architects, Kylie Jenner, playing a heightened version of herself. On a #gifted stay at an Ibiza retreat, a frazzled Charli runs into Jenner, who showers her with compliments about the viral success of “the fruit dance” (she means the “Apple” dance) and her collaboration with Johannes—who Jenner reallyy wanted to work with but couldn’t because he was busy with Charli. Charli asks her: Is this getting a bit too much? Should she disappear for a while? Jenner fires back, “The second someone says they’re getting sick of you, that’s when you have to go harder.” And so Charli returns to the Amazon Music-controlled shit show of a tour, hoping that bigger might actually, maybe—hopefully—be better.
Anyone who listened closely to Brat, past the coke-flecked bravado, knows there’s real vulnerability there. That vulnerability is transposed here into the faux-Charli’s lack of control. How can you be a genius when there’s always an Amazon deal impeding your good ideas? Can you pose with a brat-green credit card and still be an arbiter of cool? Some might read this as an excuse—the crass stuff wasn’t my fault—but it plays more convincingly as a film about drowning in success, and how impossible expectations distort your judgment. How closely these conversations mirror Charli’s real life is hard to say—but at times they feel uncomfortably real.
This film was a risk. By the time The Moment finally hits theaters later this month, we could already be looking back on Brat like a since-cured STD, or the way we currently regard LaBubus. Yet even when the movie veers into the unwieldy and ridiculous—part of its charm—it retains real pathos and lands meaningful observations about celebrity. It’s a film about what Brat was, and what it could have become. Reality and possibility pressed right up against each other. That tension is The Moment’s special magic.
‘The Moment’ premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2026. It will be released in US theaters on January 30, and UK cinemas on February 20.