The cinema of Charli xcx

Did you know that Charli xcx’s brat album cover, that now-infamous sans-serif text over a flat acid green backdrop, was inspired by Gregg Araki’s 2007 film Smiley Face? The pop star told Billboard that the anarchic, Anna Faris-starring stoner comedy lit a spark for her when she was first conceptualising the album, specifically the bare-bones font and psychedelic colours in its title credits, including a vibrant chroma key green. It wasn’t her first dalliance with the film industry, and it certainly won’t be her last.

Charli has not only been putting significant effort into an acting career with appearances in an upcoming slate of films by Araki, Cathy Yan, Daniel Goldhaber and more, she’s also started her own production company, taken up the mantle of Letterboxd influencer, visited the hallowed walls of the Criterion Closet, and taken to TikTok to sing the praises of French New Wave pioneers while wearing a Marty Supreme jacket.

She’s even tried her hand at programming, having brought the brat collection – a package of arthouse films such as Věra Chytilová’s 1966 cult classic Daisies, and Party Girl (1995), an exceedingly screenshottable Parker Posey vehicle – to New York’s Roxy Cinema in 2024. This year she selected a cadre of movies including Ingmar Bergman’s Persona to show at the same venue, themed around her biggest play for Hollywood yet: a deadpan mockumentary styled after the brat tour and aptly titled The Moment, arguably because she has managed to capture and bottle, well, the moment reached its zenith.

Charli’s not-quite-patented attitude and aesthetic has more or less achieved cultural dominance, and she has parlayed this infinite money glitch into one savvy branding exercise after another. For example, she arranged for the enormous brat-emblazoned banner she performed in front of on tour to be lightly vandalised with faux dirt and graffiti every night she performed. This auto-destructive art piece took shape as a means of demonstrating Charli’s exasperation with the album concept she had been living and breathing for what felt to her, and possibly to her fans, like too long. Yet pushing the brat bus as far as it can possibly go is something she’s still engaged in – a gambit that has brought her the indie bonafides of a buzzy Sundance premiere, seen her collaborate with some of the most prestigious figures in the film world, and neatly paved the way for her long-germinating theatrical crossover.

2024 represented a victory lap for a musician that spent over a decade as a niche icon, an IYKYK hyper-pop star beloved by gay men and misunderstood in Germany. That year, Charli came to embody a contemporary bohemianism borne from the warehouse rave: a brash, freewheeling ideology advocating for debauchery and hedonism in the same breath as a vulnerable openness about rivalries, insecurity, and grief. It’s an impressive selection of themes that also inform the plot of The Moment, in which Charli stars as a lightly-fictionalised version of herself. The film – helmed by longtime collaborator Aidan Zamiri and co-written with Bertie Brandes – explores the strangeness of contemporary celebrity and artmaking by skewering aspects of Charli’s commercial success, reckoning with the costs of becoming a public figure that traffics in aspirational femininity.

Before making a splash at Sundance with The Moment and a part in Gregg Araki’s upcoming I Want Your Sex, a few of Charli’s smaller silver-screen appearances trickled out at various festivals this past autumn. Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero premiered at Venice’s International Critics’ Week in September, before closing out London Film Festival a month later. At the 50^th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, Charli appeared in two films by European auteurs: Romain Gavras’ Sacrifice, a satirical thriller set in a cloistered gathering of wealthy elites, and Pete Ohs’ Erupcja, which she leads as Bethany, an avoidant Londoner who tears off from her live-in boyfriend on their couples trip to Warsaw.

If there is a throughline between the films Charli has featured in so far, it’s a liberal, feminist sensibility that often reads as American, even though the filmmakers who participate in it don’t necessarily come from there. What they do share with Charli is her penchant for spurning convention and embracing creative risk: of late this includes releasing an entire album for Emerald Fennell’s ​“Wuthering Heights” adaptation and a Takashi Miike slasher in which she’s slated to star as the vessel of a demonic spirit.

But back to 100 Nights: a queer, medievalist spin on the Arabic folk tale One Thousand and One Nights where Charli plays Rosa, one of three sisters punished as witches for their literacy, at a time when women are forbidden from reading and writing. We first encounter her wearing a velveteen jacquard, seductively strumming a lute. Rosa is married off to a merchant who quickly turns cold and cruel; Charli plays her with wide-eyed innocence, deftly transitioning from giggling newlywed to woman-on-the-verge, weeping in frustration. It’s a varied if brief performance, but to anyone familiar with the much-adapted story of Scheherazade, the film’s proceedings can feel a little perfunctory. And for a film billed as an empowering feminist retelling, there is a rather dispiriting degree of buried gays.

No movie is perfect. This is especially true when it comes to Sacrifice, an eco-terrorist eat-the-rich satire loosely inspired by the story of Joan of Arc. Charli really only makes a cameo appearance here, playing a performer called Mother Nature. A group of militants infiltrate an event as she delivers a high-concept, neon-flecked cover of Supernature – the hit Eurodisco track from drummer-producer Cerrone. Led by Joan (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her brother Arthur (Yung Lean), the cultists assert that three people must be thrown into the nearby volcano as offerings in order to appease it and save the world from an extinction event.

In Erupcja (or Eruption), another story featuring a volcano as a thematic crux, Charli gets a truly worthy main character moment. A 71-minute indie drama with a playful streak, the film was not-so-secretly shot in Warsaw in 2024. In early conversations with the director Pete Ohs (an American director known for his minimalist ​“table of bubbles” cineaste’s philosophy), she proposed playing against type as the ​“super shy” Bethany, a reserved British tourist. Looking as bare-faced and off-duty as possible in a slouchy striped tee, grey-framed normie sunglasses and a sweatshirt knotted around her hips, you can almost believe it. When Bethany flees her cloying boyfriend (Will Madden) to rekindle a relationship with a butch florist named Nel (Lena Góra), she begins to shed her inhibitions and the rebellious partier within emerges as they smoke, drink, laugh and dance together. It’s a natural, convincing performance from Charli: going through these motions is ostensibly how she has spent the last couple of years. Channeling every particle of her bi vibes into scenes with Góra, an authentic chemistry – not quite explosive but not quite platonic – builds between them.

Does playing a version of yourself really count as acting? I’m willing to err on the side of yes, not just because there are certain theatrics intrinsic to participating in the It girl economy of the social media age (on stage, in campaigns, via TikTok) but also because elements of autofiction tend to be hallmarks of early artistic work. In Charli’s case, this includes a testy pop star performing I Love It in Benito Skinner’s Overcompensating, a similarly bitchy caricature on SNL, and of course The Moment. It’s a lot of self-play for an actor whose ​“biggest goal is to disappear” into her roles, but perhaps this is her way of burning it all down.

To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter if Charli is a good actor or not. Post-brat, her subversive pop persona looms so large that her presence in a project brings entertainment value regardless. Her fans – and detractors – have more or less made up their minds already. But silver-screen success is something she is clearly aspiring towards, and Charli has taken a number of admirable first steps forward, largely investing her leverage into collaborations with independent filmmakers who can lend her arthouse credibility in return. ​“The main relationship in my life is the relationship I have with the industry I’m in,” she told THE FACE in her 2024 cover story. Much like the music business, filmmaking can also quickly become about becoming something bigger in perpetuity, demanding continuity at the same time as a sense of reinvention. Having weathered this cycle as a singer-songwriter, Charli is primed to do it all over again in the world of film.

The latest in a storied lineage of pop icons to cross into movies from music, Charli’s ambitions for the format are breaking box office records and, perhaps most importantly, rubbing off on her peers. ​“I’ve never made a movie that way,” The Moment producer David Hinojosa told the New York Times last week, about the frequent cast-and-crew parties the pop star would host in order to help everyone bond. ​“I’m going to steal that.”