I watched Charli XCX's Mockumentary

I was interested in The Moment, Charli XCX's mockumentary about the tail end of the phenomenon that Brat, her lauded 2024 album, became, for several reasons. First, there is something weird about it. Something about this idea that feels perfectly, deliciously weird. This is the sort of thing that could so easily be an embarrassing, lacklustre flop. It sounds like a fun, potentially barbed, canter through the warped microcosm of the music industry she exists in. But it also sounds: stupid.

As the film opens, we're shoved into the great funnel of Charli's promotional life, hapless handler in tow, thrust into the eternal awkwardness of corporate organisational noodling. The record label is bringing in a weird director to make a weird tour film. Neither Charli, nor anyone else, seems to really know what's going on.

And it's messy, this clump of E4 comedy that emerges sheepishly from the screen, wagging its tail limply, knowing its not about to get any headpats. It starts off low, with dialogue a little bit too stilted and awkward, leaning into that The Office style reliance on the natural awkwardness of the moment, and desperately needing just one person who can act.

But luckily, it picks up. Charli is not a great actor, but the more the movie goes on, the more she sells this shellshocked, Fleabag version of herself, at first too cool for the inane squabbles and power-grabs going on around her, later insane and frantically driven to drastic choices by the spectre of celebrity, and later still nicely earnest, doing a lame but still touching monologue about letting Brat die, or actively killing it in a haze of mediocrity.

I find it really interesting that the narrative has her choosing, on purpose, to make cheap hack slop out of her greatest success, wanting to bury it in some ostentatious, awful, utterly corporate way that feels total. This is the great deviation from the real Charli that sits at the heart of the film, and it's kind of great - partly because it's sort of nonsensical, so antithetical to our vision of what Charli XCX is, so obviously a choice she wouldn't make in reality - here she is, an artist freed from the trap of keeping her baby. Authenticity be damned. Jeff Bezos winks and we all laugh.

Plus, the gay people have successfully committed a beautiful financial crime. Something is, in a way, deeply right with this world.

Three Brat cards out of five.

 ★★★☆☆