Piece by Piece: this Lego Pharrell Williams biopic is a brick-busting delight
Here’s a sentence your critic never expected to end up writing while ploughing through Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics 22 years ago: Andy Warhol would have loved the new Lego Movie.
Piece by Piece is – I promise – a documentary biopic following the life of hip-hop polymath Pharrell Williams, made in the medium of animated Lego. Every last shot of Morgan Neville’s film, from dramatic reconstructions to A-list talking-head interviews, is depicted in plastic bricks – or rather, computer-generated models thereof – which was apparently all Williams’s idea. (The director and his subject’s 1.6-inch minifigure avatars hash it out in the prologue.)
For the writer and singer of 2013’s still-ubiquitous children’s party favourite Happy, it certainly makes commercial sense. The plot is a family-friendly tale of talent and persistence rewarded, and the ruder lyrics which played a part in getting there are tactfully skipped or bleeped. Through his work with Jay-Z, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake and others, he defined the whumpy-bloopy sound of the Noughties pop charts, and much of his best work gets a wildly enjoyable, speaker-rattling airing.
Additionally, while Williams’s decade-conquering career arc plus latter-day comeback is certainly dramatic, it’s not especially surprising, so the Lego gimmick adds a much-needed hook. And speaking of hooks, Williams constructs his own here from sparkling single and double-pipped bricks – a lovely way to visualise an audio process.
But beneath the film’s relentlessly cheerful plastic-studded surface, something rather subtle and clever is going on. Whether or not it was what Williams was consciously going for, he and Neville have essentially come up with today’s equivalent of Warhol’s endlessly repeating silkscreened self-portraits, or Cindy Sherman’s self-fictionalising photographic work that always seems to conceal as much as it ever lets slip. Piece by Piece reimagines the 21st century artist not just as a celebrity, but a mass-manufactured collectible for fans-slash-customers to take home and possess.
Of course, because it’s a Lego product, the grimmer bits of Williams’s story have been snipped. There’s no Blurred Lines sexism controversy from 2013, for instance – while the blame for his epic sell-out phase towards the end of the 2000s falls on a trio of nameless vampiric executives rather than anyone closer to home. But hey, the film can credibly reply: we’re working within the constraints of the brand here. The medium shapes the message. Product is as product does.
Neville is a veteran of the biographical documentary: his Won’t You By My Neighbour?, about the American children’s presenter Fred Rogers, remains the most successful film of that type ever made.
Since that film’s 2018 release, officially sanctioned character studies have become big business – look at the slews of them that keep appearing on streaming – and Piece by Piece allows Neville to make both a virtue and a joke of their airbrushing, rose-tinting tendencies. When Williams visits Snoop Dogg in his studio (the duo collaborated on the rapper’s enormous 2004 single Drop It Like It’s Hot), the room swim in a marijuana-like haze – but don’t worry, parents, it’s just vapour from an aerosol labeled “PG Spray”. Piece by Piece is a razor-sharp pronouncement on the nature of stardom in 2024. That you leave the cinema wanting to buy toys and records isn’t simply the idea of the story: it’s the moral.
In cinemas from Nov 8