Charli xcx exits her 'Brat' era in 'The Moment': How the singer is 'flipping the form' on tour documentaries
- - Charli xcx exits her 'Brat' era in 'The Moment': How the singer is 'flipping the form' on tour documentaries
Neia BalaoJanuary 27, 2026 at 3:06 AM
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Charli xcx is reveling in the moment. The Brat singer recently enjoyed the Sundance Film Festival premiere of The Moment, a satirical film in which she stars as a chaotic, over-the-top version of herself grappling with the pressures of fame — and maintaining creative control over her work — during her Brat era.
The Moment, however,marks the end of thatera. The “365” singer is ready to move on, and her string of acting credits in forthcoming films is proof of that. Charli also stars in the films I Want Your Sex and The Gallerist, both of which premiered at Sundance last week.
“Right now, I’m like the me in the film. I’m sort of like, really wanting Brat to stop,” Charli said at the Sundance premiere of The Moment. “I think for all of us as artists, it’s like, you wanna challenge yourself, and you wanna totally switch the creative soup that you’re in and go and live in a different bowl for a while.”
When does The Moment arrive in theaters?
The Moment hits theaters on Jan. 30. The A24 feature film made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 23.
Who’s in The Moment cast?
Kylie Jenner makes her acting debut in The Moment, playing a fictional version of herself giving advice to Charli.
“It’s one of my favorite scenes in the film,” the Brat singer told the Hollywood Reporter about working with Jenner. “And she has one of the best lines in the film: ‘The second people start to get sick of you is when you have to go even harder.’”
Jenner, however, was nervous to play the part.
“For the Charli movie coming out, I was so scared for days … to actually do it,” Jenner told her sister Khloé Kardashian last November. “I had a very small part. I mean, I had a lot of lines, but I was just so afraid. … I think I used to do a lot more things out of my comfort zone and now I’m used to being very sheltered, staying in a safe box for me.”
Jenner added, “I was very scared to do this but very proud of myself when I did it.”
Other cast members include Rachel Sennott, Kate Berlant, Alex Skarsgård, Rosanna Arquette, Hailey Benton Gates, Jamie Demetriou, Trew Mullen, Mel Ottenberg, Arielle Dombasle, Richard Perez, Isaac Powell, Rish Shah, Tish Weinstock, Shygirl, Michael Workéyè and A.G. Cook.
What kind of film is The Moment?
The Moment is a mockumentary. Tonally, the film is considered a comedy, though it also features more vulnerable moments.
“We wanted to combine this humor based in not quite saying what you mean all the time, which is extremely British of us, with visuals that felt fresh and arresting and exciting,” director Aidan Zamiri told the Hollywood Reporter. “Often people say that comedy doesn’t thrive well when it’s cool or there’s music or whatever. We wanted to find a mix of genres where it’s hopefully funny, hopefully emotional — and also looks cool.”
What has Charli said about The Moment?
For Charli, it was important to paint an honest picture of the music industry — and of herself as an artist within it.
“It felt very vulnerable because I tapped into the most extreme parts of my personality that sometimes I feel the need to hide and diminish,” Charli told the Hollywood Reporter. “Being an artist is a really volatile thing. One minute you can be on top of the world and think you are the best and the most important person in the room with the best ideas — a generational artist — and then the next minute you can feel like a piece of shit on someone’s shoe. I really feel that in my journey as an artist. To actualize that was hard because I don’t like feeling, especially, the latter version of that. It’s scary to admit you feel like that.”
Charli xcx attends "The Moment" premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 23, 2026. (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images) (Dia Dipasupil via Getty Images)
She elaborated on that sentiment during the film’s Sundance premiere on Friday.
“I’m obviously quite related to my character, so I had a lot of inspiration to pull from,” Charli said. “I would like to think I’m not as much of a nightmare as Charli in the film, but my real managers are in the audience and they probably know the true answer to that. And I know that sometimes I do give them a bit of a hard time. I think for me, those more spiral moments that we see in the film, I have been there. I think I am, as an artist, quite a volatile person … and nice. I’m quite nice too, right?”
What else should I know about The Moment?
If there’s one thing the “party 4 u” pop star wasn’t interested in, it was making a conventional documentary about her Brat era. She was more compelled to deliver something unusual rather than abide by her record label’s more traditional approach.
“I was approached to make a more traditional tour film around the ‘Brat’ shows I was doing,” Charli told Variety. “It kind of felt like a way to elongate the life span of the album for my record label. I was just not really into that. I was only interested in flipping the form of something quite traditional.”
Aidan Zamiri and Charli xcx at the IndieWire Studio presented by Dropbox at Sundance on Jan. 24, 2026. (Tiffany Burke/IndieWire via Getty Images) (IndieWire via Getty Images)
Instead, the pop star tapped Zamiri to help bring her untraditional, off-kilter concept to life.
“A lot of our considerations were really about [how] the character of Charli in the film is not the same as the real-world Charli — she’s fictional — but it’s also a version of her that could have existed in some different circumstances,” Zamiri told the Hollywood Reporter. “We wanted to make sure that everything that Charli did felt reasonable in some version of the universe.”
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
