Lego music doc Piece By Piece is only missing "puff" from its title

The Lego Movie, the 2014 cartoon from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, challenged a lot of preconceptions about what a movie based on a toy line could be—and, as such, became a text of permission for plenty of middling-to-bad ideas. At the center of these new misconceptions was the idea that maybe Lego wasn’t just a brand of high-end plastic building toys, and maybe it wasn’t just the vehicle for a particular style of manic but self-aware comic animation that looks like stop-motion (but isn’t). Maybe it could serve as a whole new medium, man. It’s still theoretically possible that Lego will one day produce an animated movie that exists far outside of the slightly diminished-returns comfort zone established by The Lego Batman Movie and The Lego Ninjago Movie and blazes its own inventive trail beyond family adventure-comedies. The pop music puff piece Piece By Piece would like very much to be that movie right now. Instead, it tells the agreeable but not particularly galvanizing life story of musician Pharrell Williams with the visual wit and whimsy of approximately one to three excellent music videos. It is 93 minutes long.

Piece By Piece is also rated PG, which may be its greatest novelty: a documentary about the music business—and yes, though it’s illustrated with animation, the backbone of the movie is narrative provided by real-life interviews, not full-on Legofied dramatic scenes—that’s probably perfectly fine to show a second-grader. Excerpts of it could very well work in an elementary-school music classroom when the teacher needs a break towards the end of the year, because of Pharrell’s unusually behind-the-scenes-heavy creative path and the generally wholesome image put across by director Morgan Neville.

Pharrell starts out as a music-obsessed kid in public housing, makes music with high school friends that include Chad Hugo, moves into beatmaking and producing as part of the Neptunes with Hugo, and winds up having a hand in some of the biggest and most influential pop hits of the 2000s and beyond, while also yearning to make his own sounds. Collaborators/superstars/peers like Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, and Timbaland all give interviews, rendered in Lego form. Pop hits snap together on the soundtrack.

For budding music nerds, the movie may well be transformative, or at least somewhat inspiring. To others, it might be an all-ages confounder. (This is a movie with a prominent appearance from Snoop Dogg where a smoky studio has to be sight-gagged as the result of “PG spray,” to avoid the wrath of the MPAA.) As a document of the creative process, it tends toward vagueness; it’s neat to see different beats rendered as semi-abstract, shiny Lego constructions that fit in the palm of a minifig’s hand, but it doesn’t provide much concrete detail about how Williams translates his youthful mesmerization—and his synesthesia, the condition that aids his music obsession—into living, breathing artwork, or how his personal expression merges with his obviously zeitgeisty instincts.

The movie does, however, take time to goggle in wonder at Pharrell’s sidelines in fashion and other branding partnerships, only ever lightly suggesting that they could have served as distractions from his music. Around the time that Piece By Piece starts teeing up the global-smash success of the song “Happy,” which puts forth the revolutionary idea that being happy is good and also nice, viewers may start to wonder whether a cartoon biopic that hinges on the writing of the theme song from another cartoon released by the studio’s parent company is really mining the depths of creativity and inspiration that it claims.

There are plenty of momentary visual distractions in Piece By Piece, and even some clever formal touches, like seeing computer-animated Lego scenes imitate the presence of handheld cameras. Williams himself never fails to seem like a nice, smart, creative guy. But the movie’s impressive roster of talent amounts to a few minutes apiece from various talking-head minifigs, and there’s just as much branding (are those characters rendered as Lego BrickHeadz?!) as invention. Shouldn’t a movie made of virtual Legos about an obsessive music producer have some touch of madness, however benign? Rather than blazing a new trail for Lego cartoons, this may be the first one to feel like it’s adhering too closely to its instruction booklet.

Director: Morgan Neville

Writers: Morgan Neville, Jason Zeldes, Aaron Wickenden, Oscar Vazquez

Starring: Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo, Snoop Dogg, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, Timbaland

Release date: October 11, 2024