Charli XCX brought a dose of pop-world chaos to the Sundance Film Festival this week with The Moment, a self-aware mockumentary inspired by her real-life music tour, and she’s singling out one unexpected standout.
According to Charli, Kylie Jenner is “phenomenal” in her cameo appearance, playing a heightened version of herself in the film, which is directed and co-written by Aidan Zamiri.
“The sort of people who are playing themselves, as you mentioned Kylie, she was just phenomenal,” Charli told Deadline during the festival. “She totally got the assignment. She is a really great actress.”
Premiering at Sundance, The Moment blurs the line between performance and persona, leaning into the absurdities, pressures, and ego spirals that come with fame. Jenner is just one of several recognizable faces who appear as themselves, alongside Rosanna Arquette, Jamie Demetriou, Hailey Benton Gates, and Alexander Skarsgård. Rachel Sennott also appears as herself, a performance Charli was quick to praise, along with a brief Julia Fox cameo that adds to the film’s knowing, pop-cultural texture.
“Bringing all of these amazing people into the world was just so fabulous,” Charli said, describing the experience of folding real-life personalities into the film’s heightened reality.
Speaking onstage in Park City, Charli acknowledged that the film’s version of herself hits close to home. While she joked that she’d like to think she’s less of a “nightmare” than her on-screen counterpart, she admitted the character’s volatility is rooted in truth.
“I’m obviously quite related to my character, so I had a lot of inspiration to pull from,” she told the Sundance audience. “I have been there. I think I am, as an artist, quite a volatile person. And nice though. I am quite nice too. Right?”
That self-awareness is central to The Moment, which uses mockumentary humor to examine creative pressure, control, and public perception — themes that resonate strongly in Sundance’s filmmaker-heavy environment. Jenner’s cameo, rather than feeling stunt-driven, plays into the film’s broader interest in how celebrity operates when the camera never really turns off.
With The Moment, Charli XCX adds another entry to Sundance’s long tradition of music-adjacent films that interrogate fame from the inside — and, judging by early reactions, Jenner’s brief but buzzy appearance is already one of the festival’s most talked-about surprises.
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