Piece by Piece: Pharrell’s Lego movie takes a playful approach to the music biopic

Piece by Piece is the product – and ‘product’ is the right word – of a collaboration between a creator of slick, likeable music, a director of slick, likeable documentaries, and a slick, likeable toy brand. Pharrell has always had a remarkable knack for putting novel twists on forms by marrying elements in quirky, intuitive ways. This feature is the result of the application of his genius to film.

Under the surface, Piece by Piece is a conventional biographical documentary, using talking heads, archive material and reconstructions to retrace the rise and rise of musical multi-hyphenate Pharrell. We start with his childhood in Virginia, where “something in the water” nurtures not just his talent but that of contemporaries like Missy Elliott and Timbaland – and of course Chad Hugo, with whom Pharrell goes on to form production outfit The Neptunes and hone their funky, genre-spanning sound. From there, it’s largely a tale of hit upon hit, which Pharrell (also a producer of the film) reflects on with his usual mix of cockiness and slightly ingenuous charm, in an interview with director Morgan Neville.

The surface is the twist. At Pharrell’s instigation, the whole thing is presented in CG Lego animation, in the manner of The Lego Movie (2014) and its sequel and spin-offs – although those films were released by Warner Bros, while this is the first (and possibly last) Lego movie to come from Universal since it took over partnership with the toy giant. It’s a striking innovation, given that animated feature documentaries are unheard of in Hollywood, but – in true Pharrellian fashion – the effect feels more playful than radical. Even if the film has less visual wit than the Warner Bros ones and the production values are a little lower (the animation isn’t by the excellent Animal Logic this time), the dry amusement of watching Lego versions of Snoop Dogg and Gwen Stefani talking seriously about music just about lasts throughout the film’s 90-odd minutes.

Neville is well-practised in the genre: he has directed many documentaries about (chiefly American) culture, especially music, including 20 Feet from Stardom (2013), his Oscar-winning portrait of backing singers, and Keith Richards: Under the Influence (2015). Piece by Piece is structured fluently and benefits from a packed line-up of interviewees. But the story lacks dynamic range: Pharrell has been so successful that the moments of struggle related here – notably a slight career dip around the late Noughties – feel manufactured, out of step with the man’s and the film’s sunny disposition. Nor is he up for confronting the occasional controversies, such as the sexism and plagiarism in Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ (which he co-wrote and produced). Hugo, now estranged from Pharrell, participates in the documentary but is sidelined. 

Perhaps these distortions are to be expected from a subject for whom happiness, not historical accuracy, is the truth. Pharrell is an engaging and optimistic if not hugely enlightening talker, speaking charismatically about his ambition, his influences, his synaesthesia (though curiously little about his actual creative process). His ego is tempered with a willingness to acknowledge his own arrogance. There are moments of candour, even if they still tend to be couched in generalities, as when he confesses: “Relevance is a drug. Staying relevant will have you doing all kinds of things that you regret.”

Why the Lego? At the start, Pharrell muses about whether anything is really new or whether everything is merely reconstituted from existing elements, like the coloured bricks. He doesn’t really extend this line of thinking, but he doesn’t have to: the style just fits the film, justifying itself. It chimes with his sound, which is clean and plastic, its constituent parts usually apparent. And the air of bubblegum positivity suits his persona(lity). For all his canniness as an entrepreneur, Pharrell projects an image that is light on cynicism and irony, in contrast to so much of pop culture today. How many contemporary artists with his kind of profile would release a song as earnestly buoyant as ‘Happy’ (2013)?

Piece by Piece is an authorised biodoc, and, like much of the genre, hagiographic; this is not the place for big revelations or deep critical probing. Instead, it finds a way to develop the Pharrell creative universe, or brand, on an aesthetic level in a way that is (yes) slick and likeable, and quite surprising – a fitting project for this gentle innovator and supreme aesthete. And if the film does well enough, Pharrell may end up setting yet another trend: this time, for animated documentaries.

► Piece by Piece was the Closing Night Gala at the BFI London Film Festival and will arrive in UK cinemas on 8 November.