In the annals of very real films that sound like they should be 30 Rock jokes, a feature-length documentary on the life of mega-producer and multi-platinum recording artist Pharrell Williams done entirely in the style of Lego animation is pretty high up there. And yet, Piece By Piece, from Academy Award winning documentarian Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom), indeed exists and wastes no time attempting to answer the question of “why?” In Williams’ accounting, which, it must be emphasized, is conveyed via an animated talking head while seated in a director’s chair opposite an equally animated Neville, the idea is a natural extension of his philosophy that coming up with killer beats is the result of taking musical elements from the world around him and reassembling them into exciting new permutations (we’ll circle back to this one shortly) like in a Lego set. The more likely (and mercenary) reason is that the film’s parent corporation, Universal Pictures, signed an exclusive five-year pact with Lego back in 2020 which, nearly four years in, had produced zero Lego-themed movies and somebody was starting to feel itchy over sunk costs. However we got here, Piece By Piece remains an odd alchemy of boringly conventional celebrity-documentary that plays all the hits — literally in this instance — and irreverent, occasionally visually spectacular yet rudimentary-looking display of animation. One could be forgiven for wishing the film would simply ditch the former and focus on the latter, although that’s not how these things work. In this instance, Williams is the IP being exploited, not Lego.
After setting the stage for this novel approach to artist-sanctioned nonfiction — the film opens with Lego Williams coming home to a quotidian domestic scene and being followed vérité-style by the “camera” as he makes his way through his sprawling house back to his private recording studio where they’re setting up for his interview — the film chronicles its subject’s early days growing up in Virginia Beach. It’s all idyllic scenes of the rudderless young Pharrell listening to Stevie Wonder records, being encouraged by his grandmother, and hanging out on the boardwalk (water, and Williams’ relationship to it, is an important recurring theme throughout the film, and some of the most memorable imagery arrives in the way waves lapping the beach are rendered in tiny brick form). Truly, the most remarkable element of Williams’ early years was simply the sheer amount of future hip-hop luminaries we’re led to believe were in his immediate orbit as a teenager, including Jay-Z, Pusha T, Missy Elliott, and Timbaland. However, the most consequential early friend Williams would make is Chad Hugo, a musical savant in the same middle school band class, who along with Williams would go on to form the recording/producing duo The Neptunes (we get a cute “eureka” moment of how Pharrell ultimately landed on the name). After messing around with instruments in Chad’s garage and refining their sound over the course of several years, The Neptunes catch the eye of new jack swing producer Teddy Riley, who signs the duo to a record contract only to keep the young men on the shelf, until “they’re ready.” That moment arrives when 19-year-old Pharrell is called upon to come up with a freestyle verse for Wreckx-n-Effect’s 1992 hit “Rump Shaker” (in a film with no shortage of genuinely surreal sequences, nothing quite surpasses Piece by Piece restaging large chunks of the song’s banned-by-MTV music video, which features Lego booty models in string bikinis playing the saxophone in the ocean).
Preternaturally talented and with a notably unique approach to style — as Lego Jay-Z puts it in his own talking head interview, “there’s no street in Pharrell” — Williams’ ascent to superstardom status follows a fairly predictable trajectory. Early struggles and self-doubt in the face of an unwelcoming industry leads to modest successes (like co-writing and producing Noreaga’s “Superthug”), which then beget larger successes (such as Mystikal’s “Shake Your Ass”), which subsequently gave way to the sort of crossover success (say, producing hit tracks for both Britney and Justin at the height of TRL mania) that quickly turns a producer into a household name. The film makes a compelling argument that, if you were listening to the radio in the early 2000s, Williams’ imprint as a beat-maker was inescapable, whether you recognized it at the time or not. And one of the film’s more clever conceits is to present Williams’ “beats” as a series of seemingly incongruous Lego pieces that, when assembled in the right order, emanate glowing light and pleasing sounds that can then be passed from person to person like a commodity or hoarded for future use like a vintage wine. It’s a smart way to visualize the somewhat nebulous concept of what a record producer actually does in a film that can otherwise be rather on the nose with its visual metaphors. To give but one example of this, a recording session for No Doubt’s “Hella Good” finds fans of the SoCal alt-rock band on one side of a literal divide opposite hip-hop fans, only for the gulf to collapse and the two sides to come together the longer the song is performed.
It should be noted that Williams is no passive participant in someone else’s documentary; he not only spearheaded the project from its inception, but is also one of Piece By Piece’s producers, and as such it has the unmistakable feel of a heavily messaged (and massaged) promotional piece. The film struggles to shape a perfunctory end to the second act, challenges-were-faced arc as that might require acknowledging Williams’ actual fallibility. The best Neville can pull out of his subject/producing partner is Williams’ grandmother passing away, the relatively drama-free dissolution of The Neptunes, a reticence to commit to longtime girlfriend Helen Lasichanh, and middling sales for Pharrell’s first solo album. And what’s really weird, although hardly surprising, is how the film completely ignores Williams being successfully sued for millions (twice!) by the Marvin Gaye estate for copyright infringement after lifting chunks of “Got to Give It Up” for 2013’s inescapable hit and soundtrack to an on-camera groping, “Blurred Lines.” Suddenly, all of Williams’ musings about taking from others and reassembling to “make something new” feels both prescient and incriminating, yet the film is entirely mum on this particular topic.
It’s also fair to ask whether a documentary about not just hip-hop in the 21st century, but the fight for racial justice that Williams’ music has embraced in recent years, has any business being a family-friendly, PG-rated film. This requires some damning omissions on editorial grounds — not only does the film zip past the aforementioned “Blurred Lines” music video, but skips right over one of Williams’ earliest rock-rap hybrids, the infectiously sleazy “Lapdance,” which was recorded as part of The Neptunes spin-off act, N.E.R.D. — as well as some innovative fourth-wall breaking. In one notable instance, Lego Chad and Pharrell can be seen spraying an aerosol can labeled “PG spray” before sitting down opposite famed cannabis-enthusiast Snoop Dogg (nah, that’s not pot smoke hanging heavy in the air, didn’t you see what it said on the can?). Also, in light of recent events, the filmmakers are probably breathing a sigh of relief that Lego Diddy didn’t sit for an interview, despite Williams having collaborated with him half a dozen times over the years. But no amount of playful ribbing can help sell the depiction of civil unrest in the wake of Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s murders and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement (oh look, it’s the Lego Ferguson Police Department clearing protestors from the street) as anything other than cursory to the point of being in poor taste. In truth, the film is most effective the more it embraces the metaphysical; portraying hearing music as seeing color in one’s mind eye or sending Williams to the depths of the ocean or flying into outer space (which naturally segues into his collaboration with Daft Punk). But there’s an old adage that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and for stretches of the film it feels like Neville and Williams have liberated themselves from the sort of stodgy grammar and bromides that have long been the stock and trade of conveying music in documentary form and this entire boondoggle seems to justify itself. One wishes it had simply just been an abstract visualization of the creative process, letting its freak flag fly as it soared across the cosmos (young Pharrell was a huge fan of Carl Sagan) while being accompanied by 30 years of remarkable pop music. But that’s not the film, and for as much as Williams claims he needs to do things his own way, he’s wedded to the tried and true when it comes to self-promotion. It’s still paint-by-numbers, only some of the shading has bled over the lines.
DIRECTOR: Morgan Neville; CAST: Pharrell Williams; DISTRIBUTOR: Focus Features; IN THEATERS: October 11; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
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