We’re all familiar with the phrase “separate the art from the artist,” but what if the art is about the artist? If the art involved is a form of self-expression, are we still supposed to think of the story and the storyteller as distinctive ideas? Since no one can truly separate their life experiences from their art, we can only assume they are telling us something we need to know that would contextualize the rest of their body of work.
If any artist in any medium, be it music, movies, literature, or painting, presents a self-portrait, we must ask why (what do they want me to think?) and why now (what do they have to gain?) and what it all means (does this change the way I approach their worst movie or decision to leave the band or latest public exhibition?) in the grand scheme of their oeuvre or output. All the time, artists drop their memoirs and their movies, their autobiographical songs or scenes, and say that it’s their “realest thing yet.”
But then again, what if they’re lying? Or just fibbing a little? Or just telling their own version of the truth? When someone’s truth is used for drama, how do we really know the truth? One of the finest examples of this concept is Broadway great Bob Fosse’s 1979 penultimate cinematic effort, All That Jazz, an autobiopic written by a man who knew he was dying; one of the latest is popstar Charli XCX’s faux-laid-bare laissez-faire film The Moment, her semi-fictional antidote to the concert-film experience.
“They say I won’t last too long on Broadway
I’ll catch a Greyhound bus for home, they all say
But they’re dead wrong…
I won’t quit ’til I’m a star on Broadway” George Benson
In 1974, while working his ass off directing and choreographing the Broadway musical “Chicago” during the day and editing another directorial effort, the biopic Lenny, at night, Bob Fosse suffered a massive heart attack and underwent open heart surgery. He lived, but his extremely autobiographical All That Jazz wonders what his life would have meant if he hadn’t. Fosse is represented by a character called Joe Gideon, played by Roy Scheider. This character is him in everything but name, and he was even given that name in the first draft of the screenplay. He isn’t fooling anyone. He isn’t even fooling himself.
All That Jazz begins with George Benson’s classic showbiz song “On Broadway.” Fosse, though he pretended to admonish the live theater in favor of the cinematic medium, was deep in his bones a theater person. A grown-up theater kid. The appropriate complimentary phrase is usually a “theater rat,” but Fosse was really more of a “theater pigeon,” dropping in just long enough to take a shit on someone from a distance before flying away and disappearing. He starts his movie with that song because it’s a tune about neon lights and glitter and magic in the air and women treating you right, a few of Fosse’s favorite things in the entire world.
As “On Broadway” plays, Gideon holds dance auditions for a musical that is not “Chicago,” written by a songwriting duo that is not John Kander and Fred Ebb. He has extraordinarily high expectations for himself, which means he will work these dancers like dogs. If they can’t even learn the steps in the audition, they’ll never make it. They wouldn’t want to. The dancers he trusts from previous projects will return. He chooses a few other dancers for the show. He chooses the woman he’s going to fuck tonight in his girlfriend’s bed. She won’t be his wife; that’s the woman he’s still married to. She won’t even be his mistress. And she knows that.
You see, Fosse had a reputation. During the day, he worked harder and harder, faster and more intense. In Fosse’s New York Times obituary, Broadway executive Bernard B. Jacobs said that Bobby “was thorough and he was hard working, but he was not a very nice man. He was not just nasty to other people – he was nasty to himself.” That’s a hell of a thing to say about someone who has just died, but it was the truth. He wanted everyone else to be as great as him, but this was an impossible task, as there never was and never will be another Fosse. And he would let them know it. His assistant, Tony Stevens, once called him a “manipulator,” saying, “He would do things to get a reaction…he would do it to create competition, to bring people closer to their parts, or to make an example of someone for the company.”
Late into the night, he would make even worse mistakes. “Nights alone were murder on Fosse,” wrote biographer Sam Wasson in his 2013 book. Dancer Dan Siretta told Wasson, “He’d call up girls at two, three in the morning and say, ‘Hey, I want you to come down here to my room.’ He hated the night. It wasn’t just about the sex with Bobby…he wanted to be held and treasured. He just wanted to be told he was good.”
In the film, during one of these morning-afters, his girlfriend (played by his real-life girlfriend Ann Reinking, in an extraordinarily bold bit of meta-casting), finds him in bed with one of these dancers. She cries, “I just wish you weren’t so generous with your cock” during the subsequent fight. And, again, that’s his girlfriend, not his wife, talking. What did Gwen Verdon, his practically-separated (though he was still obsessed with her) but still legally married wife, think? “Wasn’t she jealous of all his girls?” wrote Wasson. “Not really. She knew Death was the only real affair of his life.”
When you’re in the mirror, do you like what you see?
When you’re in the mirror, you’re just looking at me
I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia” Charli XCX on ‘Brat’
It is this lifestyle that kills him. He literally works himself to death. When Gideon is hospitalized following his heart attack, he is not unaware of how he ended up there. He vows to do better, but he can’t help himself. He smokes and drinks in the hospital bed. He flirts with and gropes the nurses. He reads the reviews for his latest movie. This is just who he is. His self-awareness cannot save him, but it does lead to All That Jazz.
The real-life Fosse lived long enough past his first coronary event to pen this cinematic autobiography. In it, he imagines what his death would have been like. It’s an obituary written by the dead man. It’s a funeral procession planned by the man who threw his own wake. It is a confession. It is self-condemnation. As Gideon succumbs to his weakness, a second version of Gideon appears to direct his own death sequence. The climax, which takes nearly a quarter of the entire runtime, doesn’t allow grief to take over. That’s fucking boring. No, this is a splashy song and dance routine. It’s so over-the-top that a producer character in the audience yelps, “This must have cost a fortune!”
Scheider (an incredibly modern actor — he’s not icy or stoic in that usual ‘70s way), though he looks convincingly like Fosse, was not a dancer, and thus most of the dream scenario has other people dancing at him. Tony nominee Leland Palmer as his wife, Reinking as his girlfriend, and his daughter dance out their goodbye, while an angelic chorus line sings “Who’s Sorry Now?” Broadway star and frequent Fosse collaborator Ben Vereen sings the title lyric to “Bye Bye Life.” Jessica Lange as Angelique, the Angel of Death, welcomes him to the great catwalk in the sky. His heart breaks. And then it fails him.
Over the end credits, he plays “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Even folks who know nothing about the live theater or Broadway or the New York cultural scene know brassy Broadway broad Ethel Merman and her rendition of this tune. It is true that there’s no business like show business. There’s no other profession where thousands (or, if you’re a pop star, tens of thousands) of people applaud for you as you’re clocking out.
Fosse couldn’t stand the idea of not being there for his final curtain call, so he staged it while he was still alive. Earlier in the film, after he’s choreographed a number that may save the stagnant musical that isn’t “Chicago,” he asks his wife, who’s not Gwen Verdon, what she thinks, and she stares at the floor. “I don’t know about the audiences, but I think it’s the best work you’ve ever done…you son of a bitch.”
Maybe, just maybe, if the work is good enough, if the work always gets better, if his own death fantasia is the best thing he’s ever directed, he’ll never really die.
“Who’s sorry now?
Who’s sorry now?
Whose heart is aching for breaking each vow?
We tried to warn you somehow
You had your way
Now you must pay
We’re glad that you’re sorry now” as sung in ‘All That Jazz’
In 2024, pop performer Charli XCX released her sixth studio album, “Brat.” On the record, Charli, always known for being open, honest, and revealing, acknowledges that while stardom is an honor, it’s also an awesome weight. While her music is surface-level catchy, a fusion of house sounds and club culture, Charli’s lyrics don’t shy away from her vulnerability, her anxieties, and her titular brattiness. Being famous is cool, duh. But it can also suck. And that dichotomy is simply ridiculous.
“One of the main realities of being a pop star is that at a certain level, it’s really fucking fun,” she wrote on her Substack in 2025. “You get to go to great parties in a black SUV…you get to wear fabulous clothes…you get to enter restaurants through the back entrance.” Those are the parts of stardom we all wish we could get to experience, the fleeting moments that feel elusive. But as she uses the words “embarrassing,” “humbling,” and “pointless” to explain the darker, more personal side of fame, she knows that no one cares about that crap, and no doubt they would never feel bad for her. This is what she wanted — international recognition and super-stardom.
But no one expected Brat to blow up the way that it did. The summer of 2024 became “Brat Summer,” a movement that forefronted attitude and shittiness. Fans seized the references to early 2000s culture, the paparazzi flashes, and low-cut jeans. The Paris Hilton party girl energy. The Kamala campaign co-opted the mentality; National Geographic compared the ideology to the reign of Cleopatra. Anything and everything could be Brat if it didn’t give a fuck hard enough. It was as punk rock as pop music could get. The pop star’s self-awareness, the industry’s insider-trading of synthesizer stock, was just bonus meta-commentary.
Culture critic Bojana Jovanović of Vogue Adria said that the record was “made smartly enough for people to search for a deeper meaning in it,” but music journalist Kelefa Sanneh said that “this, too, is a pop cliché: stars are constantly reassuring fans that their latest project offers a window into how they’re really feeling, when the spotlight is off,” in The New Yorker. Charli herself put it another way in that same Substack piece, writing, “My final thought on being a pop star is that there is a level of expectation for you to be entirely truthful all the time. All my favorite artists are absolutely not role models, nor would I want them to be…I don’t care if they tell the truth or lie or play a character or adopt a persona or fabricate entire scenarios and worlds. To me, that’s the point, that’s the drama, that’s the fun, that’s the FANTASY.”
“I used to never think about Billboard, but now I’ve started thinking again.
Wondering ’bout whether I think I deserve commercial success.
It’s running through my mind.” Charli XCX on ‘Brat’
It should come then as no surprise that her latest project, the mockumentary The Moment, co-written and directed by music video collaborator Aidan Zamiri, sees Charli playing a semi-fictionalized version of herself. It is strange that the word “mockumentary” is used to describe both this film and something like This is Spinal Tap (1984), because while both films are, according to those in the music industry, all-too-fucking real to made entirely made up, The Moment isn’t ever really laugh-out-loud funny. In fact, it’s actually quite somber. It’s a funeral for Brat, one where managers and producers and directors and executives milk this cash cow for every last drop (remember that producer in All That Jazz commenting on the cost of a death sequence?) while Charli steps back to see just how goofy the whole thing is, and considers putting it to bed. Her character watches this all happen to her in a passive sort of way, but she is, behind the real-life camera, the author of the story.
Her opinion on the whole movement (or moment, if you will) is confusing in a rare bit of contradiction. In October 2025, almost a year-and-a-half after the album’s release (after two whole Brat summers had passed), Charli told Vanity Fair that she doesn’t “really get to decide when it’s over or not. I think that’s up to the world. It will eventually exist as a relic. I don’t think people will forget it.” Just a few months later, in January of 2026, The Moment was released, and a fictional (can we be so sure?) music executive in the period piece of 2024 explains that their blank check dream is for “Brat, this amazing moment,” to “last much longer, maybe even forever. That’s the goal, isn’t it?” A fictional (or is she?) version of Charli responds, “I mean, I don’t think that’s the goal.” Brat, at some point, could, and should, die.
While All That Jazz is about a Broadway choreographer in the ‘70s and The Moment is a behind-the-scenes look at a popstar in our not-so-faraway past, the two films share a sensibility beyond just the aesthetic of our leads looking incredibly fucking sexy while smoking cigarettes. Both films are about the death of an era: the oft-copied but never fully understood curved shoulders and finger snaps of a seedy Times Square, the toilet-bowl line of coke in a London nightclub.
They’re about the loneliness and isolation that the attention brings, the bedding of a different woman every night, the awkward moment when your driver Googles you and you have to explain (and partially apologize for) that music video you did in Amsterdam for the movie about kids with cancer. And it’s about how those two thoughts in tandem predict and explain the death of an artist. For Fosse, that was trying to live while already dead. For Charli, it’s about getting ahead of it before it’s too late.
Charli, a true cinephile herself, has not logged or rated All That Jazz on her Letterboxd account, and I can’t find any evidence online to suggest she’s been inspired by the picture, much less that she’s ever watched it before. If that’s true, she somehow made her own version, one I would even go as far as to call a loose remake, of a movie she’s never seen. I think she should. I think she’d fucking love it.
Essay Courtesy of Patrick J. Regal