In Piece By Piece , Morgan Neville ( Won’t You Be My Neighbor? , 20 Feet from Stardom ) tries to upend the conventions of the celebrity documentary using LEGO animation. Yes, you read that correctly: LEGO.
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Premiering at Telluride before its October 11 theatrical release by Focus Features, Piece By Piece tells the life story of multihyphenate Pharrell Williams through elaborately designed set pieces composed of animations of the popular plastic building blocks. If there is anyone for whom this wouldn’t be a completely strange and off-kilter idea, it’s Williams, whose career has been defined by a buoyant irreverence. Starting with his childhood in Virginia Beach and delving into his wildly successful music career, Piece By Piece reveals, in sweet and inspiring terms, how the producer turned rapper turned singer turned fashion icon has never been one to be boxed in.
But while inventive, Neville’s doc can’t quite avoid the trappings of the celebrity-produced biopic, and is expectedly marked by typical hagiographic evasiveness.
To be fair, Piece By Piece , with its PG rating, seems geared toward a younger audience, and the box-office success of The Lego Movie likely bodes well for its theatrical release. Neville pads the doc with scenes that encourage self-acceptance and vague platitudes about finding the higher calling within one’s dreams. And while they can be stirring, they aren’t as persuasive as the moments when Williams lets his story speak for itself.
The liveliest parts of Piece By Piece are when the musician recounts growing up in Virginia Beach. Using LEGO animations allows a vivid portrait of life in the Atlantis Apartments, a housing project whose community inspired him. The way people played music through their windows, hung out in the courtyard and looked out for each other nurtured a young Williams even when he felt out of place. The construction blocks are also a wonderful way of representing Williams’ synesthesia, a neurological condition that causes people to experience more than one sense at the same time. When listening to music, Williams saw different colors, patterns and, in his words, “beautiful cascades of light.”
Williams knew that people thought he was odd, especially once he started school. Those early collegiate years were alienating and challenging for the artist, who struggled to focus during lessons. He was eventually forced to repeat a grade. Interviews with Williams’ parents supplement Neville’s interview with the musician.
A young Williams didn’t find his place until he started taking music classes at the encouragement of his grandmother, who took him to church and bought him his first drum kit. He met his Neptunes partner, Chad Hugo, through those classes. Together, the pair would cut school and jam, creating music that represented their eclectic taste and experiences. Magic happened when Williams made music, and a similar kind of enchantment takes place when he talks about it.
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Another strength of Piece By Piece is how the LEGO animation enhances our understanding of Williams’ process. It can be challenging to represent creation in a documentary, but here Neville, with the help of editors Jason Zeldes, Aaron Wickenden and Oscar Vazquez, offers dynamic sequences that offer glimpses of how Williams’ mind works. The way Williams talks about matching beats to specific artists or finding just the right sound to round out a record affirms his genius. Beats become objects with lives of their own, meticulously catalogued and cared for by the artist. Inspiration for songs can come from anywhere, including the sound of a spray paint can. (It’s worth noting that Williams has five original songs in the doc, which complement Michael Andrews’ fanciful score.)
From Snoop Dog’s “Drop it Like It’s Hot” to Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U,” Williams and Hugo, collaborating as the Neptunes, produced many of the hottest chart-topping records of the late ’90s and early aughts. Interviews with Timbaland, Missy Elliot, Snoop Dogg and Jay Z add energetic anecdotes that help construct a portrait of Williams as a fledgling producer.
When Piece By Piece chronicles Williams’ later years, the doc begins to mirror much of what audiences have come to expect in celebrity film projects. Using LEGO animation can’t fully mask the relative thinness of those parts of the narrative.
Still, there are some moving moments, like when Williams speaks candidly about how early success ballooned his ego until he had alienated his closest friends, or how he found himself through producing for Kendrick Lamar and writing his Despicable Me 2 hit “Happy.” One wonders if some of these more stressful junctures in Williams’ life might have been better served with live footage.
At a brisk 90 minutes, Piece By Piece doesn’t have much time to linger, and this evidently leaves some questions — about details of the estrangement and reconciliation between Hugo and Williams, or what happened to Williams during his creatively fallow years. So while Piece By Piece will undoubtedly inspire audiences, it doesn’t always make us feel closer to its subject.
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