Piece by Piece, now streaming on Peacock, is Pharrell Williams’ take on a music doc, which means it’s shot through with the producer, musician, songwriter, designer, etc. etc.’s distinct brand of whimsy. And you can’t miss the creativity – it’s rendered everywhere you look – since this bio/doc/comedy is constructed from blocks of LEGO entirely. Piece by piece, Piece by Piece director-writer Morgan Neville imagines the memories and moments of Williams’ life and career, and along the way, Pharrellian friends, family, collaborators, and inspirations drop by to drop quotes while becoming LEGO themselves. Jay-Z, Snoop, Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Kendrick Lamar; Chad Hugo, Williams’ longtime bff and N.E.R.D. bandmate; Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, Pusha T; Pharrell’s parents, his wife, and his minister; even legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, the King of Neptune, and a LEGO fish singing one of the film’s original songs.
The Gist: “What if nothing’s new?” LEGO Pharrell wonders to an onscreen LEGO Morgan Neville in Piece by Piece. “What if life is like a LEGO set? And you can put ‘em together whatever way you want.” The pieces here mark Williams’ journey from his hometown of Virginia Beach – where all the kids skating, rapping, singing, and making beats used to gather at the oceanfront Neptune statue – through his professional ascendance and early work for star producer Teddy Riley (“Just ‘Shake Your Rump’!”), the fertile stretch of “beat stackin’” that made Williams and Neptunes in-demand hip-hop and pop producers, and onward through the conventional arc of a music doc, where an artist’s lowest lows inspire soul-searching and a renewed creative period.
What isn’t conventional at all in Piece by Piece, obviously, is that all of this is happening in LEGO. The family hi-fi and vinyl record collection that stirred the synesthesia within Williams – to experience music as colors – are here, all in LEGO. His childhood dreams of water-filled landscapes, and the untold promise of outer space and the distant stars: LEGO. And the rush of recording studios, music biz parties and accolades, and the making of huge beats and hit singles that led to huge piles of money – in Piece by Piece, LEGO is always the visualizer. Which certainly inspires some gleeful disruption of a typical scene. Because in what live-action documentary will Jay-Z ride a jet-ski right from the ocean onto the stage?
By the time the film breaks out a LEGO Daft Punk for the don’t-call-it–a-comeback celebration of the 2013 hit single “Get Lucky,” it’s incorporated elements of musicals, kids’ movies, biopics, and music videos into what overall remains a documentary frame. And the message it sends via worlds of built blocks and personalities in figurine form is pretty universal, even as it retains the moments of Williams’ life. People just want to feel good, no matter who they are, and the best kind of feeling good comes from combining good things together. “Even though it seemed like we were from two different planets,” Gwen Stefani says in Piece by Piece, “it was like two cultures’ collision of beautifulness.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Piece by Piece is the sixth LEGO movie, and the first since a takeover of the collaborative contract with the Danish toymaker by Universal, which has plans for way more LEGO-based media. And remember how the first LEGO Movie had sneaky pathos? In that sense, imagining the format of a music doc, only through colorful LEGOs and personalized figurines, makes total sense. Piece might also remind you of Williams’ work as a composer for the Despicable Me films. And for another kind of tweak on the music doc form, check RapCaviar Presents on Hulu, where Williams and Tyler, The Creator free-associate on the creativity as a concept.
Performance Worth Watching: Replete with billowy clouds of “PG Spray” – does this LEGO smell like a jazz cigarette? – the Piece by Piece sequence that recounts Pharrell and Chad’s first meeting with Snoop Dogg is a highlight. As a LEGO Snoop recalls, it was the impulsive weirdness of the beat for “Drop It Like It’s Hot” that inspired in him a sense of fun. And it also went to #1.
Memorable Dialogue: “Music was just coming out of me. Can’t tell you where it’s coming from. I don’t know. Creatively, I’m going in there.” [LEGO Pharrell points at a LEGO moon, takes a chunk for himself.] “I’m just reaching into oblivion, reaching into the future. And we don’t know what the hell we gonna bring back. I’m new to this. But it’s awesome.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Save us, LEGO Carl Sagan! As a medium, the toy building blocks that make up Piece by Piece really offer Pharrell Williams and Morgan Neville a blank canvas. A LEGO Pharrell who has reached his creative bottom, overwhelmed by figurative body shots to his muse and the very real advance of yes men and sycophants, drifts aimlessly through space. As images from old TV that used to inspire flicker through his mind – Spock’s Vulcan hand salute, constituted in U-shaped plastic – Pharrell the lost astronaut encounters Sagan, the legendary astronomer and life sciences advocate. And as it turns out, what keeps the planet spinning was the force from the beginning.
In Piece, even if the standardization of music doc formatting occasionally threatens dullness, sequences like the Sagan appearance, or Pharrell entering his imagined inner sanctum of bespoke-crafted beats, or Busta Rhymes’ usual expressiveness transcending his LEGO form, reach for the kind of porous magicalness that defined the early-2000’s films of Michel Gondry. You know, flights of unbound visual fancy and ambition, with notes of inspiration, to keep things interesting. If you built the best beats Williams ever made out of LEGO, they’d look like this, too.
Our Call: STREAM IT. You’re getting the facts of life about Pharrell Williams, as a music documentary should do. But Piece by Piece truly soars when it embraces the potential of its LEGO building blocks, with imaginative visuals to match Williams’ famously omnivorous approach to production and songwriting.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
