Strobing lights, throbbing music, and dangerously revealing mini skirts.
This is what Charli XCX’s Brat tour seemed to be made up of when I had the chance to see her last Spring at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
Sunglasses on, XCX strutted across the stage with a microphone in hand, performing songs like “club classics” and “360” as a cameraman followed her closely in a kind of dance, projecting the singer’s image onto the video walls behind her. As the climax of the night, the 20,000 spectators watched in awe as she performed “track 10” amid an orchestrated downpour, her body moving to the beat, her hair whipping water droplets into the crowd.
It has been nearly two years since Charli originally debuted Brat through a surprise Boiler Room set in March of 2024. Her uniform? Thick eyeliner and a shirt with something of a prophecy: “CULT CLASSIC.” There, in a 75-minute performance, she not only gave a taste of the album but also did so through a variety of mixes of the original songs. Then, two months later, the green—now a shade aptly called Brat green—album cover was unveiled, and a revolution began.
What made the album different was her seemingly brutal honesty; there was no need to sugarcoat her lifestyle. Chanting lines like “bumpin’ that” and her tour poster featuring an empty plastic bag, XCX earned the self-proclaimed title of a “365 party girl”. For many of her fans, it was refreshing to see an unadulterated look into the life of a star of her caliber.
And while the album is seen as a 41-minute-long party anthem, it is not just a one-dimensional account of the glamorous life of a pop star. In fact, a part of her honesty is reflected in songs like “I might say something stupid” and “I think about it all the time,” where she laments the anxiety she feels being a part of the music industry.
After multiple Grammy wins, multiple TikTok trends featuring her songs, and music videos surpassing 300 million total views, Brat Summer has become something of a distant memory.
Now, as her next innovative play, XCX released the mockumentary, “The Moment,” last month. The roll-out was slow, beginning in New York and LA; I waited with bated breath to see if I could attend a showing. My friend Olivia—who attended Charli’s Brooklyn show last spring with me—and I were considering a roadtrip to Hartford to catch a showing. But luckily, a few showings popped up at our local Cinemark.
The film advertises itself as a mockumentary, the slogan and overall premise being “it’s a movie about brat and charli and a tour, but none of it happened, but maybe some of it did.” There is a simultaneous sense that it is clearly scripted and an underlying curiosity about what actually happened during the tour planning process, as explored in the film.
While acclaimed for her music, this is certainly not her first foray into acting; she has appeared in shows like Benito Skinner’s “Overcompensating” and is featured in the upcoming “The Gallerist.” In “The Moment,” she has a natural screen presence and is formidable on-screen, conveying emotional shifts with the ease of a veteran.
The film portrays a similar level of honesty to Charli’s in Brat, with a kind of anxiety laced throughout the 103 minutes. The film opens in the fall of 2024 as Charli and her team prepare for her tour, the question of “what next” hanging over each character’s head, with increasing intensity throughout. While there are montages of the club lifestyle she seemingly subscribes to, the volatility of the fame she is experiencing is the primary focus. The anxiety of Charli and her team undercut by punchy one-liners. Characters like Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skargard), Kylie Jenner, and Rachel Sennott, playing a sort of stylized version of themselves, serve as a reprieve from moments of XCX’s eventual self-destruction.
The film closes with a fictional goodbye to the era, which also evidently marks the end of the chapter in the singer’s actual career. It is bittersweet in tone, a nostalgia laced with a finality and closure that artists so often do not allow audiences to experience.
However, the goodbye to the Brat era does not mean the artist has let up. Weeks after the original release of “The Moment,” Emerald Fennel’s “Wuthering Heights” featured XCX’s original score. The twelve songs feature the singer’s voice in a distant, echoing, dream-like state.
Brat was a defining moment not just for Charli XCX, but for the pop culture landscape as we know it. While there is a level of sadness in knowing that the time of Brat Summer is over, the film “The Moment” serves as a time capsule, preserving the memory of the iconic, culture-defining record.
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