Charli xcx has her movie star moment, and says goodbye to Brat

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PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Charli xcx plays herself in “The Moment,” a meta mockumentary about the end of Brat summer and grappling with otherworldly success.

“I was just really interested in telling this story about expectation,” Charli xcx told The Associated Press the day after “The Moment” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.

The 33-year-old pop star from Essex has been in the music industry since she was 16, with a career trajectory that she described as anything but straight forward. Then, in 2024, it hit a crescendo with her sixth studio album, “Brat,” which became a pop culture phenomenon. Finally, she said, she felt understood for a moment. And then, just as quickly, it changed.

“There was this sort of, kind of, you know, persona that people really associated me with and then there were a lot of expectations put on me as a person, as an artist, of who I was then supposed to be. And I didn’t fit into that sort of narrative,” she said. “I had got to this place where I was finally feeling so understood. Then I was like not understood again.”

Making something immensely popular and resonant can be a double-edged sword for an artist working in a business that would sometimes rather milk the “sure thing” forever than let someone evolve and move on. She found herself wanting to grapple with that tension, that existential conundrum that she’d experienced.

A straightforward documentary didn’t seem like right approach, so she and Aidan Zamiri, the 30-year-old Scottish photographer and music video director, got to work on something else, something that felt truer to them. “The Moment” is a little “This is Spinal Tap,” a little “Black Swan,” a little meta, with the likes of Kylie Jenner and Rachel Sennott playing themselves, a little funny and a little wild. It’s heightened, but also true.

“I won’t lie, there are definitely some crossovers,” she said. “I haven’t made the choices that Charli in the film makes, but I’ve definitely, like, come close to it. … It was a very accurate depiction of what I’ve experienced in the music industry.”

One of the buzziest titles in a starry program, the A24 film will be in theaters faster than most: It opens in New York and Los Angeles on Jan. 30 and expands wide on Feb. 6.

In “The Moment,” Charli xcx is under pressure as Brat summer comes to an end, having to stage a concert film with Amazon, with a sleazy director not of her choosing played by Alexander Skarsgård, promote a Brat credit card, and fall in line with what music executives want from her. She’s also not sleeping and getting increasingly frazzled about everything.

Zamiri, who directed her “360” music video and has become one of her best friends, was excited by the challenge and to direct his first feature film. He also understood intrinsically what she was going through.

“It’s this battle of expectations and of people wanting one thing from you and you feeling this pressure too, to stick with it, to keep providing that one thing for fear that maybe that attention, that excitement about you will falter if the next thing they don’t love,” Zamiri said. “I love the process of making stuff. But part of it, which is often really exciting but also weird, is the sharing with the world because then it’s just no longer yours anymore … it becomes its own thing which I think we saw happen in real-time with Brat.”

As with the “Brat” album and everything she does, Charli xcx has been intimately involved in the marketing and promotion of the movie too.

“I love marketing, I really do,” she said. “I think there’s an interesting gap in film between the vision of the filmmaker and the marketing. It’s been really cool working with A24, who are definitely determined to bridge that gap. I mean like, come on, with ‘Marty Supreme, ’ for instance? It was so well done.”

Her favorite part, though, is always the creative process, so to have made a film about just that was especially rewarding, she said, “even when I’m being an absolute crazy (expletive).”

There’s a palpable energy around “The Moment” as it approaches its theatrical release. Charli xcx made sure that some fans actually got into the premiere, not just industry folks and those who could afford expensive festival passes. Afterward many celebrated into the wee hours of the morning at a DJ’d party.

“I love all the fans wanting to roll up with their sunglasses on and their crop tops,” Zamiri said. “I get the feeling they’ll show up for this like they would for a concert. That’s the coolest thing ever.”

The Sundance Film Festival was a kind of coronation for Charli xcx, the actor, with three films across the first weekend, including Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex,” where she played the uptight girlfriend of Cooper Hoffman’s character, and Cathy Yan’s “The Gallerist,” as an art world influencer type with bleached eyebrows. They’re not her first on screen credits, but they do show her range in addition to her ability to carry a film, even if she’s playing a version of herself.

It's a big moment for Charli xcx personally, too. She's a self-professed cinephile with a not-so-secret Letterboxd account, where she’s logged 1,357 movies so far. In a recent review of “Paddington 2,” she wrote “lives up 2 the hype.” Her four favorites are Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” David Cronenberg’s “Maps to the Stars,” Jacques Rivette’s “Céline and Julie Go Boating” and Abel Ferrera’s “The Addiction.”

To now be so fully entrenched in the filmmaking industry, she said, “has been like everything and more.” She also did a companion concept album for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming “Wuthering Heights.”

“I really am sort of like desperate to like learn more and more and more about, you know, about every part of the film industry: Making a film, being in film. I’m so hungry,” she said. “I feel so incredibly lucky that I’ve been a part of the films that I have been part of thus far. I mean, like, to work with Aidan? To work with Gregg Araki? To do a (expletive) scene with like Natalie Portman? I’m like what the (expective)?”

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For more coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/sundance-film-festival