Can you make a moment last forever? Or does drawing it out only leave it feeling hollow? That’s the conflict at the heart of Charli xcx’s tour mockumentary, The Moment. 

For nearly a decade, the singer had earned a reputation as a beloved underground pop icon – a counterpoint, or an antidote, to more mainstream acts. Then came Brat. In 2024, the album’s caustic green facade and pulsing club-soaked beats became inescapable, sending xcx to the stratosphere. 

The Moment picks up in the immediate aftermath of “Brat Summer,” following a fictionalised version of xcx as she grapples with a popstar’s Faustian bargain. Facing down the barrel of unprecedented success, she has to choose between her artistic integrity, navigating fame her way, or giving the industry what it wants and letting herself get swallowed up in the glow of Brat’s acclaim.  

Less “Spinal Brat” and more “Brat Swan,” the film is a descent into madness, closing in on an xcx suffocated by executives, brands, and managers who want to spin Brat green into gold and sell her vision to as wide an audience as possible. 

Accentuated by a hypnotic score from longtime xcx collaborator and producer, A.G. Cook, the film isn’t a sing-along of the album’s greatest hits, but rather a deconstruction of it. The clashing elements, discordant sounds, and heartthumping beats that made hits like “Guess”, “360”, and “Sympathy is a Knife”, are retooled and stripped down to their elements, creating a soundscape that’s familiar, but unsettling, as if filtered through a dream (or in this case, Charli’s nightmare).

Following the film’s world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, we spoke with Cook about the film, working with Charli, and finally saying farewell to Brat. 

The vibe at the Sundance premiere was insane. There were people lined up for hours in -10º weather. How did it feel to see the finished product with a big audience?

A.G. Cook: I kind of wanted to wait until the premiere to see the final version, just to feel a bit more of that buzz. It was nice to see people laugh at the right places, and it was hilarious that it was in a high school. I mean, that high school is nicer than most cinemas, but it blew my mind. 

You’ve been one of Charli’s closest collaborators, and you were there for the actual madness of Brat summer. How does the fictionalised version we see in The Moment stack up?

A.G. Cook: I mean, it’s obvious that the movie is quite meta, but for me, it’s genuinely quite emotional just because I’ve been working with Charli for decades. It’s been amped up slightly, but it also feels really true to me. Some of those scenes bring me back to when I was helping Charli through conversations with record labels, or hearing her talk to concert venues and managers, and it’s nice to see that translate into something more universal.   

Charli previously said that she’s playing a “hell version” of herself in the film. What are your thoughts on her portrayal?

A.G. Cook: I think that kind of humour comes through in her music as well. We’re a little bit alike in that way, but Charli’s obviously more of a legit superstar. [Laughs] She’s very willing to embody this kind of high-octane version of herself and really push herself to the limit. I think that’s actually related to her songwriting as well: her ability to portray herself in different ways to make quite exciting music. Even before Brat, where she found a whole new angle on that approach, you have something like “I Love It.” The lyrics were written in half an hour, and they encapsulate something larger than life and true, but also sort of cartoony. In a way, that DNA has always been there with her. 

“It’s genuinely quite emotional just because I’ve been working with Charli for decades. The film has been amped up slightly, but it also feels really true to me”

Even the score has this sort of meta element to it as well, where it captures a version of Brat without replicating it. How did you want to approach it?

A.G. Cook: I definitely set myself a few rules to make it easy to create some kind of difference in practice between how I work as a producer and someone scoring a film. I think it was clear that we didn’t want to have anything that was very overtly ‘Brat’ unless it was a meaningful part of the scene. A lot of the sound design for the score was related to the palette of the album, but made more minimal, malleable, and flexible. Over the course of the movie, we started with these kick drums and saws with these slightly Brat-coded sounds, but then let it kind of dissolve into something more… not ambient, exactly, but spooky or almost hysterical. 

I loved that even the songs we do hear are used in the film to heighten that bizarre, hysterical effect. Like ‘I might say something stupid’, for example, is already crushing on its own, but in the context of the film, we’re watching Charli perform it during rehearsals, mostly for an audience that doesn’t seem to understand or care about her vision. It takes the isolation she’s singing about to another level.

A.G. Cook: Yeah, I knew the songs we used would have their own kind of distinctive purposes from the script. There’s that feeling, I think, especially in the first half of the film, where it’s a bit more overtly documentary, and the music is more like a fly on the wall. Then it’s not until the second half or even the final third that it becomes a bit more like a movie. 

I think that’s related to Charli’s own character as well – her inner monologue and justification that she’s being a popstar and not necessarily being ‘Charli the person’ anymore. The way the story permeates through to the cinematography and the sound mixing as well was very intentional. 

There’s one major needle drop in the film, and it’s The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’. How early on did you know that was going to be in the movie, and how did it influence your plans for the score with that particular scene?

A.G. Cook: That needle drop was pretty much a part of the script, so I knew that was coming from the beginning. Because of that, there were a few acoustic instruments, some piano and strings that I had saved for the final third of the film. I wanted to make sure because the strings in ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ are so iconic, that we had no strings until that moment hits, Charli’s removing her makeup, the piano comes in, and it gets swallowed up by the song. It felt really instinctive. 

At the core of the film, there’s this struggle for control. Charli creates an album to express her creative vision, but once it’s released, it becomes this unwieldy thing – a symbol, a product for executives to cash in on, a magnet for discourse.  What do you think about the success of Brat now, two years on? 

A.G. Cook: Well, you know, it's funny. [Brat] was certainly the first time in my career that something became such a truly overtly mainstream thing. I had various levels of this, even from the earliest days of doing PC Music. When I graduated university in 2013, the music I was making around then was very obscure, and suddenly, it was being picked up by blogs and people in different countries, and that’s sort of how I ended up meeting Charli. Flash forward another seven years or so, and you have the emergence of hyperpop as a label. 

I think it’s all a very valid, interesting push and pull, but I don’t really try to think of it too much. I have a long list of ideas of people I want to work with, and I’m really drawn to strong personalities. I find it really musically inspiring, so I’ve found funny ways of doing A.G. Cook albums that still surprise me and challenge me. 

How does that approach inform your work with Charli? Is that an outlook you both share?

A.G. Cook: Yeah, I think that’s why, when Charli and I work together, we like to work very fast and keep it quite visceral. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have completely separate conversations about other people’s campaigns, or talking about music and culture as a whole. There’s just something inherently escapist about making music and the way you can get lost in it. 

Brat happened, really, because Charli and I, after collaborating on a few different kinds of albums, were talking about making something for the hardcore fans, for ourselves, for the people who enjoyed “Track 10.” That was the kind of ethos we went in with. I guess the thing that we truly, finally did for ourselves is the thing that communicated the furthest. So it’s just been this really interesting journey with Brat, where I tried to focus on the core of enjoying the making, whether it’s songwriting, sound design, production, or collaboration. 

The Charli we see in the film doesn’t want Brat to end, because she’s scared of what the future might hold when it does. Where do you see the real-life Charli going from here?

A.G. Cook: She’s playing with that idea in the movie, but truly, she does want that era to end. [Laughs] Charli is someone who’s really interested in making new music and setting up new challenges. She’s not easy on herself, and she’s very ambitious as well. That’s very evident. I think there’s always that question of do you have the confidence to let something go if it’s really clicking? And how does that work? 

Artists are always pressured to reinvent themselves. But then as soon as something does well, there’s another pressure to keep it going. I think [The Moment] works because it’s quite clear that Charli is someone who’s always evolving, and has enjoyed evolving. She’s kept her core personality, but taken on so many creative forms and adopted them into this quite idiosyncratic worldview.

The Moment, and The Moment (The Score), are both out now