Ironically, the film explores similar themes to her pre-brat album, Crashfor which she leaned into working with Atlantic and even sang songs written by professional songwriters. “I’ve always been interested in the idea of what a ‘sellout’ is in modern-day pop music and if it even exists,” she told Rolling Stone in 2022 about the album’s themes. In The MomentCharli actually becomes a sellout, but shilling yourself isn’t positioned as subversive in the film. It’s sad.
It’s hard not to see the film’s final horrific turn toward corporatized pop stardom as also being, in some ways, about Charli’s (and perhaps every pop artist’s) music rival, Taylor Swift. When Charli relents to Johannes’s vision, she dons Life of a Showgirl glittershe reaches her arm out to the crowd in very Swift fashionshe makes smiling speeches to the crowd. Her transformation into a Swift-like pop politician is as horrific as the final chapter of The Substance — not because Swift is so terrible, but because all of it is so untrue for Charli. And it’s sad for us to witness someone deflate themselves into cliché.
Thankfully, The Momentas a film, avoids such a fate. It lingered with me like the final ghostly harps of “Track 10.” Amid all the discursive riff raff that Charli inspires it’s easy to forget her artistry, but The Moment shows us again that she really is this decade’s most essential and challenging pop star.
