{"id":273527,"date":"2026-02-04T12:33:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T12:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/273527\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T12:33:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T12:33:07","slug":"the-legacy-of-pop-star-cinema-lives-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/273527\/","title":{"rendered":"The Legacy of Pop Star Cinema Lives On"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018The Moment\u2019 finds Charli xcx battling with her own persona, a ritual that David Bowie, Madonna, and Lady Gaga all performed on the silver screen before her<\/p>\n

Between her auteur-friendly video screenings<\/a> and recent visit to the Criterion Closet<\/a>\u2014where she name-checked David Cronenberg and waxed rhapsodic about the beguiling, late-stylin\u2019 brilliance of The Shrouds<\/a>\u2014it would seem that [extreme Lonely Island voice]<\/a> Charli xcx is a major cinephile. She is, at least, probably the most world-famous person whose Letterboxd is actually worth following; her top four on the site currently includes titles by Cronenberg, Abel Ferrara, and Paul Thomas Anderson, as well as Jacques Rivette\u2019s exhilarating, labyrinthine 1973 masterpiece, Celine and Julie Go Boating, which Charli has described as taking place in a \u201cThrough the Looking Glass\u2013type world.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That last phrase is a pretty apt summation of a movie that plays like a surrealist riff on Lewis Carroll. Meanwhile, Charli\u2019s new film and multi-hyphenate showcase The Moment goes through the iPhone screen darkly. It\u2019s a paranoid fantasy about the perils of being placed (or else willingly wriggling) underneath the social microscope\u2014of disappearing down a rabbit hole (or maybe k-hole) of one\u2019s own making.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a thin line between authentic, off-putting solipsism and calculated self-deprecation, and The Moment\u2014directed by the savvy Scottish photographer turned Chalamet whisperer<\/a> Aidan Zamiri\u2014serves nicely as a display for Charli\u2019s burgeoning acting talents. \u201c[She] may not have much movie experience,\u201d wrote The New Yorker\u2019s Richard Brody<\/a> of her performance last year in the underseen indie Erupcja, \u201cbut she dominates the action with classical canniness, her energetic yet poised performance showing keen awareness that movie acting favors minimal strain, because the camera can transform thought into action.\u201d The point about less being more also applies to her work in The Moment; the highest compliment I can pay to her performance is that she\u2019s credible as a somnambulist, sleepwalking her way through a circle of handlers, sycophants, and frenemies who all claim to be acting in her best interests (whatever those are). In one corner: Charli\u2019s longtime (fictional) collaborator and tour designer, Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), a figure of thoughtful, cigarette-burned solidarity excited to try out as many alienation effects as possible onstage. In the other, the repellent, expertly passive-aggressive interloper Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd), a hired-gun documentary director given plenty of ammunition by executives hoping for their own version of the Eras Tour.<\/p>\n

The latter is an avatar of clueless, expedient, corporate-backed compromise, flaunting his aesthetic insecurities and trying to manipulate his star like she\u2019s a Cocaine Barbie. Ever a game comedian, Skarsg\u00e5rd is credibly pathetic in the part, although by the time Johannes reveals that his revamped set design includes a 15-foot-high cigarette lighter representing the immolation of fame, the film has drifted\u2014deliberately\u2014into caricature, splitting the difference between This Is Spinal Tap and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which it resembles as a behind-the-scenes satire dotted with cameos by industry A-listers.<\/p>\n

There are worse places to be, and the most interesting thing about The Moment is how it connects to a long tradition of movies attempting to thread the needle between pop stardom and cinematic credibility. For instance, the presence of Rosanna Arquette as a callous, bottom line\u2013minded record exec slyly invokes Susan Seidelman\u2019s 1985 film, Desperately Seeking Susan, a madcap comedy made under the sign of Celine and Julie Go Boating and featuring a pre-superstardom Madonna in a role that channeled her shape-shifting sensibility.\u00a0 In a 2024 interview with Vanity Fair, Seidelman recalled<\/a> how she had to lobby her studio to let her cast the singer as the film\u2019s eponymous woman of mystery; Madonna supposedly did her part by jokingly propositioning an Orion executive in her office. (\u201cHow do you know unless you try?\u201d the singer supposedly replied when the older woman explained that she was heterosexual.) The gambit paid off: Madonna is brilliant in Desperately Seeking Susan as an obscure object of desire who attracts not only lovers but also copycats; we understand instinctively why Arquette\u2019s bored housewife, Roberta, would want to live vicariously through such a magnetic figure, to the point of stalking Susan through New York and adopting her seductive, neo-bohemian lifestyle as her own.<\/p>\n

The Moment is very much a comedy of identity crisis: Call it Desperately Seeking Charli. Or maybe Truth or Dare, since either way the implication is that what its star-slash-subject really wants is to cosplay as Madonna. \u201cTruth or Dare is incredible,\u201d Zamiri told Interview<\/a>, and the echoes in The Moment of Alek Keshishian\u2019s 1991 documentary\u2014shot during Madonna\u2019s 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour\u2014are unmistakable, especially in its shared focus on image maintenance and making. The risks embedded into the project were real\u2014by granting Keshishian entry into her inner circle, Madonna was ostensibly at the mercy of the same camera lens she\u2019d made her name mesmerizing on MTV. At the same time, Truth or Dare was designed to call attention to its own construction, tracing a sly convergence of artistic agendas; the question was whether Keshishian was lifting the veil on his subject\u2019s process or accessorizing her penchant for artful obfuscation. Warren Beatty\u2014who\u2019s perhaps the biggest control freak in showbiz, and whom Madonna was dating at the time\u2014objected to his appearances in the film, threatening a lawsuit unless certain scenes were excised. In the final cut, he\u2019s seen scowling at the crew and bemoaning his partner\u2019s narcissism. \u201cWhy would you say something if it\u2019s off camera?\u201d he snarls sarcastically<\/a>. \u201cWhat point is there existing?”<\/p>\n

The only A-lister who comes off worse than Beatty in Truth or Dare is Kevin Costner, whom Keshishian uses ruthlessly as a straight man, scoring points off his nonplussed response to Madonna\u2019s polymorphous perversity. \u201cAnybody who says my show is \u2018neat\u2019 has to go,\u201d says Madge after a postshow meetup, sticking a finger down her throat; Costner was famously hurt by the behind-the-back diss, and gratified when Madonna proffered an onstage apology years later. Costner\u2019s cameo as the squarest guy in the greenroom may have been mortifying, but it helped to contextualize his performance a year later in The Bodyguard, in which he played a former Secret Service agent hired to protect Whitney Houston\u2019s chart-topping superstar from a crazed stalker. \u201cHer life as a pop star means that everything is set to her requirements, which is totally different from what happens when shooting a film,\u201d said director Mick Jackson of Houston, who\u2019s serviceable enough in a part that\u2019s stitched together out of clich\u00e9s (by the time she appeared in Waiting to Exhale, she\u2019d more sufficiently honed her chops).<\/p>\n

The greatest performances by pop stars are the ones that retain an element of surprise or else find a way to weaponize stage presence. Think of Mick Jagger\u2019s sinister self-portrait in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell\u2019s Performance, a tour de force in decadent menace topped off by the diabolical proto\u2013music video performance \u201cMemo From Turner,\u201d<\/a> delivered with all the satanic majesty (and sympathy for the devil) he could muster. Or David Bowie in Roeg\u2019s subsequent\u2014and even more spectrally beautiful\u2014sci-fi allegory The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie recalibrates his Ziggy Stardust persona to play an extraterrestrial who becomes increasingly alienated the longer he lingers on earth. Or a de-platinumed and deadpan Debbie Harry as the kinky TV psychotherapist and BDSM enthusiast Nicki Brand in David Cronenberg\u2019s Videodrome, staring down James Woods\u2014and the audience\u2014from the other side of the all-seeing TV Eye. More recently, Lady Gaga tried to go dark in Joker: Folie \u00e0 Deux, a movie that so successfully undermines the appeal of its predecessor that it\u2019s almost brilliant, or at least strangely bracing<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On a rewatch, Gaga\u2019s stubborn refusal to lean into the aura-farming appeal of her work in A Star Is Born\u2014another movie whose DNA is swimming around in The Moment\u2019s bloodstream\u2014seems worthy of grudging respect. Like Madonna, Gaga is a great conceptualist who recognizes the power and necessity of putting on the mask and taking it off: They\u2019re both mothers of reinvention. Charli has a ways to go on that front, at least as far as filmmaking is concerned (and \u201c360\u201d isn\u2019t quite \u201cLike a Prayer,\u201d either), but she\u2019s a quick study who\u2019s making the most of playing catch-up. The Moment\u2019s ending, which isn\u2019t worth spoiling here, manages to conjoin defiance and deference; it\u2019s a salvage operation disguised as a cautionary tale, sweetly bleak and sincerely cynical. The Moment is brat, and it also isn\u2019t. That ambiguity is the mark of an artist who\u2019s determined to work on her own terms, even as she figures out what they are.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Alan Sepinwall<\/p>\n

<\/a>Alan Sepinwall is a television critic, author, and podcaster whose writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, in The New York Times, and now on his What\u2019s Alan Watching? site. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018The Moment\u2019 finds Charli xcx battling with her own persona, a ritual that David Bowie, Madonna, and Lady…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":273528,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":{"0":"post-273527","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}