Enough time has passed since COVID that it feels oddly appropriate for Kino Lorber to release Charli XCX: Alone Together on Blu-ray — a film that now plays less like a pandemic documentary and more like an accidental origin story. Watching it in 2026, it’s hard not to see the film as a kind of prequel to The Moment: a snapshot of Charli XCX suspended in transition, post-hyperpop but just before the full detonation of the brat era.
The documentary opens in 2019 with Charli finally preparing to embark on her first headlining tour after years of navigating mainstream pop’s machinery. Post-“Boom Clap,” she had the songs, the acclaim, and the cult following, but not necessarily the level of cultural recognition that matched her influence. Tired of chasing traditional pop stardom, she had finally started carving out a lane entirely her own — only for the world to slam shut as the COVID-19 pandemic forced everything into lockdown. Suddenly quarantined in Los Angeles with her managers and then-boyfriend Huck, Charli is left trying to process both global collapse and the strange stillness of her own life.
To maintain momentum — and maybe her sanity — she decides to make an album in just 40 days. Alone Together becomes the document of that process. Because the entire world is trapped indoors, Charli opens the creative process to her fans through Zoom calls, handheld cameras, voice notes, and collaborative online feedback. Watching it now, the level of access feels almost impossible to imagine from the post-brat version of Charli. This kind of intimacy only works because she hadn’t fully crossed over yet.
The film also spends time with several of Charli’s “Angels,” spotlighting their own pandemic experiences in parallel with hers. Thankfully, the documentary never crosses the uncomfortable line where fandom becomes performance art or emotional exploitation. Instead, it creates a mirrored structure: isolated fans watching an isolated star trying to stay connected in real time.
That balance matters because celebrity documentaries often collapse under the weight of their own self-awareness. Whenever a pop star interacts with fans on camera, there’s always the risk it feels calculated — impossible not to think about the infamous Taylor Swift fan-surprise videos that later got hilariously skewered on Scream Queens.
But the real drama here isn’t fandom — it’s intimacy. The Charli we see in Alone Together is grappling not only with the pandemic, but also with the reality of suddenly living full-time with her long-term, on-and-off boyfriend Huck. There’s an unspoken melancholy hanging over the entire project because we already know where the story goes. In 2021, Charli would meet George Daniel of The 1975, eventually becoming engaged and later married. That hindsight gives the film an almost tragic dramatic irony.
Much is made of the fact that despite being together for seven years, Huck still hasn’t proposed. Before quarantine, the two had apparently never spent more than a few consecutive weeks together. The album itself slowly becomes a public autopsy of a relationship already nearing expiration — an evolving art project documenting its own emotional instability in real time.
What makes the film work is how authentically uncertain Charli feels throughout it. She’s insecure, restless, occasionally difficult, and still trying to figure out what kind of artist — and person — she actually wants to be. Thankfully, none of it comes off as self-serving or overly polished. That rawness is why Alone Together now feels like the first chapter in a fascinating unofficial trilogy.
If this film captures Charli before ascension, then The Moment feels like the next logical step: a surreal, self-aware exploration of fame after becoming fully absorbed into the pop-cultural machine. Alone Together documents the person before the mythology calcifies. Post-brat, these same themes — authenticity, performance, intimacy, self-construction — become far harder to interrogate sincerely without audiences immediately questioning motive. That tension is exactly what makes this evolution so compelling.
Ironically, it’s something artists like Taylor Swift constantly struggle with in their own documentaries. The more powerful the brand becomes, the harder authenticity is to convincingly perform.
The Blu-ray itself is fairly barebones. The film runs just over 70 minutes and arrives with only a small handful of trailers as supplements. Honestly, that restraint works in its favor. Any retrospective commentary recorded this close to Charli’s current level of fame would probably feel overmanaged or overly conscious of public image. The documentary already reveals just enough to remain emotionally revealing without tipping into voyeurism or exploitation, and mercifully exits before the audience has time to start interrogating its boundaries too aggressively.
What’s most fascinating now is how closely the Charli we see here resembles her heightened “character” in The Moment. The two films almost seem to mirror and refract one another — documentary and mockumentary functioning as companion pieces about identity construction under celebrity capitalism.
There’s something genuinely interesting happening right now with cinephile pop stars attempting to deconstruct their own fame through film. The Weeknd and Charli XCX are both offering compelling “inside-out” examinations of celebrity culture, but unlike Hurry Up Tomorrow, Alone Together benefits from catching its subject before total canonization. We don’t need an earlier film showing Charli struggling anonymously in obscurity because this already functions as that transitional text: Charli rolling out of bed during lockdown, trying to stay creatively alive while trapped inside a relationship quietly falling apart.
There’s something deeply relatable about that uncertainty — about watching someone attempt to romanticize permanence while subconsciously sensing impermanence. Especially when the emotional centerpiece of the relationship arrives via Huck being asked, on camera, what Charli’s best feature is, only to immediately answer: “Her boobs.” Sometimes the most revealing moments in celebrity documentaries aren’t the grand confessions — they’re the accidental ones.
