Documentary Review: 'Charli XCX: Alone Together' Chronicles the Bond of Artist and Fan

I love fandoms. I love dedicated groups of people who take to an artist and their art and become a community. It’s an online phenomenon that did not exist when I was young and part of various fandoms. I am still a fan of many different artists and their work but I’ve never been part of a fandom and I envy those who have that connection and are able to share their love of pop ephemera with other like-minded people. I’m happy when I see a group of people who get along and are able to find a space to share their dedication to something.

The new documentary Charli XCX Alone Together is about a pop star coping with the pandemic, the lockdowns, and all that came with the start of COVID-19’s hold on the country. Part of how that pop star, Charli XCX coped with the pandemic and shelter at home was further embracing her fandom, bringing her biggest fans even closer to her via virtual hangouts on Zoom, Tweeting and interacting on social media, and eventually deciding to make an album that was fully part of her online community, one that could organically be attributed to her fans who contributed lyrics, ideas, art and support.

This type of coping wasn’t unique to Charli XCX. Plenty of other fandoms and creators deepened their bond through pandemic lockdowns. The Twitch format is a great example of where you can find massive supportive fan groups centered around celebrities, gamers, athletes and YouTube channels. Many used the pandemic to develop and grow their fandom through new forms of social media marketing and the like. Others with fandoms that already existed in one sphere took their fandom online to Twitch and Zoom during the pandemic.

Not all of those stars took the time to hire directors and document the lives they were already documenting online. That’s what Charli XCX did and while that was a calculated choice, the documentary doesn’t feel mercenary, it doesn’t come off as opportunistic. Rather, Charli XCX comes off as someone who just had a good idea and went with it. One of the things that I enjoyed about Charli XCX: Alone Together is that despite being a pop star, Charli comes off unpretentious, unpackaged. I hesitate to call anyone ‘real’ as popular culture has destroyed the meaning of that word, bastardizing and co-opting that word to the point where it nearly means the exact opposite of its actual meaning. No, not ‘real’ but perhaps, grounded and strongly self-aware.

The documentary follows the creation of Charli XCX’s album, Alone Together, which she wrote and recorded from her home on a laptop with a really good mic. Her producer was several states away and would send her beats and we watch Charli come up with lyrics that quickly become songs. When she struggled to come up with lyrics, the star would get on social media, call a zoom meeting with fans, and get their ideas for what they thought of particular beats and possible lyrics. This kind of bond with fans is one that may make lawyers cringe a little about copyrights and credits and so on, but the movie never dwells on such things. Instead we get the excitement, beauty and occasional frustration of creativity in action.

Charli XCX Alone Together centers on Charli XCX but in another example of her bond with her fandom, the documentary makes room for several fans to talk to the audience about themselves, their experiences of the pandemic, and what the Charli XCX fandom means to them. These moments flesh out the bond between creator and fans and the strange shift we can see today in how fans and creators interact with each other. If you thought tweeting and getting a response from your favorite creator was exciting, imagine jumping on a zoom and having one of your lyrics make it into a song.

Sociologists must be having quite a time keeping up with the ways our parasocial relationships with celebrities have changed in the internet age. People in my mother’s generation would write letters to movie stars and rock stars and would be overjoyed to receive form letters or fan club invitations that most certainly did not come from their beloved star. Now, in the age of social media, you send messages and know when your hero has read them. Even more immediately, you can jump on zoom or twitch and have a face to face virtual moment with your favorite celebrity. We are in the midst of this sea change and the ramifications of this are only now being felt and documented.

In that context, Charli XCX Alone Together is fascinating and engaging. It’s entirely uncritical and optimistic about the relationship between artists and fans but I can still see some value in scratching the surface of this brave new world of online fandom. Charli XCX: Alone Together does that, it provides an uncritical, surface level look at the good that can come from artists and fans connecting in new ways. This documentary is like the start of a brand new conversation about where our relationship with celebrity is headed and there is value in starting that conversation.

That was not the intent of Charli XCX: Alone Together. Rather, it's just an interesting by-product of a pop star who just wanted to document the making of an album in a very strange time in our shared history. The motives of Charli XCX seem genuine, they appear to come from a place of a lonely artist eager to connect with people and the technology happens to exist now that allows for that connection to be vast and unending. Most will see this as merely a product of the pandemic and lockdown, but I see something more in this documentary. When people watch this documentary in the future it could be a signpost of the evolution of fandom and the bond of artist and fan.

I urge you to see this movie for yourself and think about it as both a document of the career of a famous pop star but also as an artifact of the shifting standards of our parasocial bond with celebrities. Charli XCX: Alone Together will be in limited theatrical release as of January 28th and will be arriving soon after on Streaming Rental services.