At the start of Piece by Piece, the new animated documentary about Pharrell Williams, the musical artist and megaproducer explains why the film takes place in a visual world composed of Lego. Well, sort of. A mini-fig version of Pharrell, doing a sit-down interview with a mini-fig version of director Morgan Neville, says something along the lines of how lately he’s been thinking about what it means to make something new from things that already exist — like the universe is a Lego set and we’re all working with the same basic set of elements and shades. Then he suggests to Neville that the whole film they’re in the process of shooting should be Lego, because it could have “limitless color,†which is pretty much the opposite of his first point, but whatever. What’s obvious after a few minutes of Piece by Piece is that the movie isn’t rendered the way it is because of some profound thematic ties between its subject’s life and the plastic construction set, but because the Lego is an attempt to inject something of interest into what is, even by the pre-chewed standards of authorized celeb docs, textureless pablum.
We’re in a peak era of movies about famous musicians that are produced by those same famous musicians (or their labels), though to call them movies doesn’t do justice to the way so many of them are really more like glorified album extras that have been bumped up to the level of primary offering. They’re made for an audience of fans who can appreciate them for what they are — not stand-alone projects but the latest output from someone whose career they’ve already bought in to. They’re not portraits so much as they’re acts of brand maintenance, offering carefully doled-out glimpses of vulnerability in the midst of the mythmaking. Bookending this particular moment on one end is Ezra Edelman’s Prince documentary, which by all accounts is an in-depth attempt to get at the genius and the darkness of its legendary subject as an actual person, and because of that may never get a release due to pushback from Prince’s estate. On the other is Piece by Piece, which wordlessly shows Lego Pharrell reconciling with a Lego version of his Neptunes partner, Chad Hugo, despite the fact that the former duo are not on speaking terms and are in the midst of a lawsuit over what was once their shared name.
It’s enough to make you say, “Hey, maybe not everyone needs to have a movie made about them,†though Pharrell is actually getting two. Michel Gondry is currently finishing up a musical inspired by the man’s childhood in Virginia Beach, which promises to be even more whimsical if (hopefully) less calculated. What’s maddening about Piece by Piece isn’t that its subject’s life is short on accomplishments — Pharrell has inarguably helped shape the sonic landscape of the 21st century — but that he’s so bad at storytelling. The film plods through his life like it’s ticking off sections of a Wikipedia entry, but there’s no sense of certain episodes being more significant than others. There are interludes you wish the movie would dwell on more, like the stretch in which Pharrell, Hugo, Timbaland, and Missy Elliott are all teenagers together, and others, like Pharrell’s collaborations with various corporations, that could have been skipped. In his telling, bolstered by a celeb-heavy slate of supplemental interviews, things just happen. There aren’t highs and lows, just highs, and it’s clear that the filmmakers weren’t expected or inclined to breach any topic that might cause any discomfort. When the film does finally have to come up with something like conflict, the best it can do is suggest that Pharrell was hypnotized by a group of evil men in suits to pay too much attention to focus testing.
What’s left is the Lego of it all, and that does lend itself to touches of novelty and imagination, as well as full-on ridiculousness. It’s a little disturbing to see the abs on mini-fig Gwen Stefani, but the Lego re-creation of the video for Wreckx-n-Effect’s “Rump Shaker†(for which Pharrell wrote the Teddy Riley verse) is delightful, as is seeing someone’s reaction to first listening to the Neptunes’ work visualized by his exploding into component parts. While Neville conducted most of his interviews over Zoom or audio, the movie animates them all to appear to be in person, down to what are now documentary clichés, like the camera snapping in and out of focus, or a clip starting with someone getting set up to film before they start talking. There’s no question that being in Lego makes Piece by Piece more visually dynamic than a standard taking-heads-and-archival approach, though it also doesn’t take long for the gimmick to become a constraint. When Pharrell has his first encounter with Snoop Dogg, the meeting occurs in a haze of “PG spray†from a can, a cutesy joke that gets you wondering if the intent of that sanitizing gesture is because kids are somehow expected to watch this solipsistic endeavor, or because keeping it clean is a Lego requirement. This is, for all its mildness, a movie about a 51-year-old man, and when it gets around to his work on Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,†and depicts Black Lives Matter protests being carried out by mini-figs, it’s enough to cause temporary delirium. Such are the perils of committing to a bit — though for Piece by Piece, the bit is really all the film has.
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