PLOT: The life of Pharrell Williams, as told through the lens of Lego animation.
REVIEW: Let’s get one thing out of the way first – Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece would be a conventional music documentary if not for the central conceit: the whole movie is animated in the style of The Lego Movie. It’s an interesting choice which gives Pharrell’s story a glossy twist and likely opens the film up to a much younger audience that would have initially seen a more conventional hip-hop documentary. Indeed, with its PG rating, this is a family-friendly take on the life of perhaps the most influential music producer of his time, although it can’t help but feel like total hagiography at times, with it free of even a whiff of controversy throughout.
To be sure, Pharrell’s rise and fall (and rise again) is free from too much rock star excess, as he never went down that route. Instead, the whole thing feels like kind of a fairy tale, as Pharrell, as part of The Neptunes, rises to become an artist whose stamp is on virtually every pop hit that came out over a good ten-year period in the early 2000s.
However, if you remove the Lego animation, Piece by Piece isn’t that different from a conventional documentary that might have found its home on HBO. It’s full of talking (Lego) heads, and director Neville manages to nab seemingly everyone Pharrell’s ever worked with, including Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Snoop Dogg, and many, many more.
The one aspect of the movie that the Lego animation truly elevates in Piece by Piece is the re-enactments in Lego of Pharrell’s youth and rise to fame, with sequences dramatizing the creation of some of his most iconic tracks, like Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” and more.
Yet, a more unvarnished bio might have dug deeper into some of the conflicts from Pharrell’s career, such as the multi-million dollar “Blurred Lines” lawsuit and the fact that he has a very fraught relationship with his former Neptunes partner Chad Hugo (although the latter contributes to the film and both speak glowingly about each other – on film at least). In the movie, Pharrell’s only problem is depicted as his tendency to overextend himself, with him getting too caught up in the commerce of music-making rather than the artistic side of it all. It all comes to a happy ending, literally, as his song “Happy” becomes a massive, inescapable hit.
While I found Piece by Piece mostly entertaining, I did find myself wondering who exactly the film was for. Hip-hop fans will maybe be annoyed by the fact that it’s so family-friendly that many of the best songs from Pharrell’s discography, such as N.E.R.D’s “Lapdance,” are way too controversial to be included in a movie animated by LEGO. Also, don’t expect to see P. Diddy show up as a talking Lego head in this – for obvious reasons.
In the end, Piece by Piece is most suitable for younger audiences, but even if a more unvarnished music doc would have been welcome, the movie still does a good job evoking the fact that Pharrell’s had an outsized influence on modern pop music. Yet, given the animation style, it can’t help but feel a little too much like a novelty.