Pharrell Williams’ Lego Movie Feels Superficial And Performative

There’s something about “Piece by Piece” that is a bit off.

It’s not the fact that the new movie on the life and career of megaproducer Pharrell Williams is done entirely in Lego animation (that’s actually an intriguing concept in theory) or that Lego Pharrell often goes on lengthy, Deepak Chopra-esque tangents.

It’s that “Piece by Piece” feels disingenuous and — at risk of reigniting a decade-old backlash against Williams calling himself “New Black” and saying he “doesn’t blame other races for our issues” during a 2014 Oprah Winfrey interview — has an air of exceptionalism and performativity. With confounding direction from the usually terrific Morgan Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom,” “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”), the film goes out of its way to portray Williams as above human.

In some sense, “Piece by Piece” fails in a way recent celebrity documentaries have. It presents a hagiographical portrait of a largely beloved figure and doesn’t question any of it, letting the subject run with his own story to the film’s detriment — regardless of how much of it is actually true.

While “Piece by Piece” has been marketed as “an animated biopic” that defies genre and format, it has much clearer documentary elements. The film features interviews with Williams’ parents, wife Helen Lasichanh, collaborators and friends, including Missy Elliott, Gwen Stefani, Chad Hugo, Pusha T and Snoop Dogg, who all enlighten the audience with anecdotes about, essentially, Williams’ talent and greatness.

That’s appealing enough for audiences interested in learning more about his music inspirations, as well as his ascent from a humble Virginia childhood all the way to the Billboard charts. The film peppers that timeline with numerous needle drops from the hitmaker’s discography, including No Doubt’s “Hella Good,” Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U” and Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” that will likely have fans bopping their heads.

Those moments in a movie about a musician typically support what is supposed to already be an interesting story about, in part, where genius meets humanity. In “Piece by Piece,” which Williams co-produced, they carry the story but feel frivolous, particularly with the otherwise effective Lego animation.

Now, why is this a Lego-animated movie in the first place? In it, Williams doesn’t really explain the choice when Neville surprisingly informs him that the film could be done in whatever way that he’d like. It’s surprising considering the filmmaker should be guiding that decision, but “Piece by Piece” is basically that way because Williams could do that.

However, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter , Williams said it was because he more or less wanted to remove his image from the film so he could “objectively” appreciate himself in it.

(Left to Right) Jay-Z and Williams take audiences down memory lane.

“When I hear myself without any kind of other platform or anything connected to it, I’m like, ‘Shut the fuck up,’” he said. “‘Literally, why are you saying that? Like, who cares? Who do you think you are — some philosopher?’”

But “Piece by Piece” seems quite fascinated with how Williams sees himself, albeit in a superficial sense. The film — from a screenplay by Neville, Oscar Vazquez, Aaron Wickenden and Jason Zeldes — dutifully follows along as he tells an oddly self-curated story about his life and the ideology of his own success.

Williams told THR that he evaded doing a movie about himself for years because “I am too much of a perfectionist and I’m too opinionated.”

“Piece by Piece” feels like the negative result of that. For instance, during Snoop’s interview, the rapper calls Williams on the phone to ask him, “What do you want me to lie about?”

It’s a striking moment in the movie. Not because it’s shocking to learn that an interviewee in a celebrity documentary could be getting fed information on what to say from the subject to make him sound good. (That probably happens in other documentaries too, but we just don’t know about it.)

Rather, it contributes to an overarching feeling throughout “Piece by Piece” that much of it is for show. It’s a potential PR move (complete with five new tracks from Williams) to remind both the fans who’ve held on and those who’ve dropped off of how great he once was — before the “New Black” debacle, the “Blurred Lines” controversy , and simply not being hot right now .

Ultimately, the film becomes a frivolous exercise in celebrity folklore. Even details in the movie that could be somewhat interesting, like a flashback of fellow producer Timbaland, Missy and Williams making music during lunchtime at their Virginia high school, are just added for fun and not actually true. (Missy didn’t go to school with Williams and Timbaland, with Williams telling THR the scene “was cinematic liberty.”)

(Right to Left) Director Morgan Neville interviews Williams in a scene from "Piece by Piece."

But for what reason? Why agree to a movie about yourself when you’re unwilling — or not ready — to tell the real story? (It’s worth noting that Williams has another movie coming out about himself that will be a musical set in 1977. Considering that Neville told THR that “Pharrell’s private,” this doesn’t seem like the type of move a private person would make, unless he has some other motivation for doing so.)

And then there is Williams musing over his accomplishments, which he attempts to explain as gifts from mythological gods. He also describes the idea of Lego blocks as pieces that connect to one another to come up with a great hook, beat or other lyric. There is really no telling if the audience will rock along with these moments in the movie.

But they paint a really abstract idea of who Williams actually is. He seems to have a lot of thoughts about his place in the world, how he views himself, and challenges he might face (racially, professionally or otherwise) that could make him one of the most misunderstood figures in Hollywood today. But “Piece by Piece” doesn’t investigate that.

For instance, a well-known report from earlier this year that Hugo and Williams are embroiled in a legal dispute over their group The Neptunes’ name gets barely a mention in the film. Instead, “Piece by Piece” imagines a cordial reunion.

The moment is without much dialogue, so the audience doesn’t know what that conversation was — only Williams’ voiceover narration folded into reflections on his own choices. That leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

When THR asked Williams whether he and Hugo are now on speaking terms, the producer replied, “No. But I love him, and I always wish him the absolute best, and I’m very grateful for our time together.”

Why not portray that in the movie instead of an imagined reconciliation?

Where “Piece by Piece” gets most interesting is where it spends the least amount of time: examining Williams’ vulnerabilities, particularly why so many of his collaborators and friends, including Hugo, distanced themselves from him around the time he became a supernova.

It's hard to tell at times why Williams chose to do a film about himself, particularly one like this, right now.

It’s hard to believe that it was just because he started buying into his own celebrity, attaching his name to silly merchandise brands and, as he puts it in the movie, losing his way a bit.

Nestled deep within Neville’s film is a potential story about selling out, which maybe Williams did, and how white bigwig investors used a popular Black face and talent for their profit — only to turn their backs on him once they invariably sucked away at his soul.

But Williams doesn’t blame other races for his own choices, so the film would have likely never acknowledged being turned into a commodity for largely white consumption. Still, that doesn’t make it any less true.

Williams broadly alludes to mistakes he’s made and vaguely acknowledges that he was less than a good person at times, but he never reveals more than that. Could it partly have something to do with his and Hugo’s relationship? Who knows.

It’s only when Mimi Valdés, former editor-in-chief at Vibe and a producer on “Piece by Piece,” steps in to interview Williams that the film starts to actually seem interested in its subject in any real way.

She asks him why he didn’t immediately follow up his 2003 hit, “Frontin’,” with another solo song, which encourages him to divulge discomfort around his own massive celebrity. Williams is actually visibly — well, in Lego form — vulnerable while talking about this.

But it takes a long while in the 93-minute “Piece by Piece” to get to this point, and you can sense the haste for Williams to pivot to a more comfortable moment for him to revisit, like when he regained his inspiration and came up with the 2013 smash hit “Happy” that sparked a movement and led to his emotional interview with Winfrey.

The whole “New Black” portion of that teary conversation is conveniently left out of “Piece by Piece.” Like so many other details in the movie, perhaps it just doesn’t fit into the controlled image the film so obviously wants to reflect.

“Piece by Piece” is in theaters Friday.