Say “music mockumentary” and most people immediately go to This Is Spinal Tap, or its precursors, All You Need Is Cash and the “Bad News Tour” episode of the British TV series The Comic Strip Presents. The setup is comics playing fictional musicians and often inadvertently becoming real-life rock stars in the process.
Yet there’s the other side of the music mockumentary, in which real-life musicians think they’re funny enough to make a spoof of their own careers. That’s often a tougher transition, as shown by ABBA’s wise decision to make themselves supporting characters in ABBA: The Movie. Arguably, the only truly successful iteration of the idea to date is the Oscar-nominated A Hard Day’s Night.
The Moment doesn’t break that streak. Like a hip-hop skit stretched to feature length, it’s a quite extraordinary vanity project for Charli xcx. While the British rave phenom is producer, star, and grabs a “story by” credit, the script by director Aidan Zamiri and co-writer Bertie Brandes centers on a project that never really happened. Back in 2024, when it was Brat Summer everything, Charli xcx (playing a fictionalized version of herself) finds herself under record company pressure to make a concert movie. She doesn’t want to do it and so ensues a battle over artistic integrity that never uses the words.
The part about Charli xcx rejecting a concert movie is true, so instead she made a low-stakes, faux verité fake behind-the-scenes documentary about the hardships of being famous. Vanity projects aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but the weakness of the self-indulgence here is highlighted by a long excursion to Ibiza, where Charli stays at a fancy hotel and gets yelled at by a woo-woo holistic facialist. There are no consequences to any plot threads, just setups for the next gag. Fans will learn little about Charli herself beyond a carefully curated persona and will probably be doubly annoyed by the lack of her music.
A cameo by Kylie Jenner, and occasional onscreen appearances by Stephen Colbert depicting how the media can turn on a celebrity, highlight the internal contradictions of The Moment. It’s one long humblebrag, of Charli xcx grinning through the fourth wall and telling us, “Hey, look, I know Julia Fox!” Her charisma and charm help smooth over some cracks, but The Moment does exactly what her character fears that the concert movie would do: take the edges off her, just as Zamiri toothlessly imitates the style but not the savagery of Gaspar Noé. Much as The Moment seems to want to take swipes at the Eras tour and resultant catalog of films but never dares utter Taylor Swift’s name, everything is played too safe.
Honestly, there’s a far more interesting film bubbling away in the background about the battle between concert film specialist Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård) and Charli’s longtime tour creative consultant, Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates). However, it’s hard to say whether their bickering about lighting rigs is meant to be a truly brutal satire of the battle between artistry and industry, or just a workplace argument. If it’s the latter, then it’s baffling to think that Charli xcx seemingly made a music biz riff on The Office and then decided to play David Brent.
A Hard Day’s Night worked because the Beatles were all genuinely charismatic, funny, and took none of this seriously. By contrast, The Moment plays everything safe. Treating Coldplay as a punchline is fine (who hasn’t?) but the sharpness of that aside is blunted when you realize that Charli xcx has played their support act. It’s like Madonna fake-gagging after meeting Kevin Costner backstage in 1991’s Madonna: Truth or Dare – we get it, you’re cool. Making a movie about how annoyed you were that your label tried to force you to make a concert movie is just 103 minutes of Charli xcx relitigating an argument she already won, just with added product placement.
The Moment
2026, R, 103 min. Starring Charli xcx, Alexander Skarsgård, Rosanna Arquette, Hailey Benton Gates, Kate Berlant, Jamie Demetriou, Isaac Powell.
This article appears in February 6 • 2026.