Producers: Mimi Valdés, Pharrell Williams, Caitrin Rogers and Morgan Neville Director: Morgan Neville Screenplay: Morgan Neville, Jason Zeldes, Aaron Wickenden and Oscar Vazquez Cast: Pharrell Williams, Shae Haley, Chad Hugo, Pusha T, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar, Teddy Riley, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake and Rob Wallace Distributor: Focus Features
Grade: C+
Music producer, singer/songwriter and multi-hyphenate mogul Pharrell Williams gets documentary treatment with a twist in Morgan Neville’s “Piece by Piece,” which tells his life story rather conventionally, except for the fact that it’s in the form of a LEGOS movie. The result is visually delicious and emotionally upbeat but, however carefully fine-tuned, it still can’t escape feeling a bit like an ego trip heavy on the hagiography.
Things begin with Neville interviewing Williams, who suggests the LEGO format even as it’s already being employed by the animation crew supervised by Howard E. Baker. He then begins recalling his boyhood in the music-rich Atlantis Apartments in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and his realization that he’s a synesthete who experiences music in terms of color as well as sound—a phenomenon, he suggests, that makes animation a perfect medium for telling his story.
That story can be told, as related here, in rather broad strokes. His work in school, he admits, was mediocre until, with encouragement from his parents and his grandmother (who bought him a snare drum), he turned to music, and at a special camp met Chad Hugo, a saxophonist with whom he formed a band, The Neptunes, in 1992. They were discovered by music producer Teddy Riley at a talent show, and their work with him, writing songs for bands he promoted, led to their becoming album producers themselves, working with numerous major artists, with whom William collaborated on many cuts in styles from rap and hip-hop to pure pop. As Williams explains, and his many famous collaborators confirm, his special knack is coming up with ear-captivating beats that become the basis for smash hit numbers when elaborated with words and themes. (The beats are shown here as pulsating little contraptions he puts in little boxes until the perfect opportunity to use them arrives.)
But Williams also wrote songs for himself. Probably the best known, and surely the most successful, was “Happy,” part of the soundtrack for “Despicable Me 2” in 2013. Its spectacular international popularity helped launch his solo career as a singer/songwriter. His desire to express himself creatively in other ways, meanwhile, has led him into other areas, most notably fashion, culminating in his appointment as men’s creative director for Louis Vuitton in 2023.
From a purely narrative perspective, “Piece by Piece” is pretty ordinary. Williams tells his story quite straightforwardly, with Neville occasionally adding questions or comments, while friends, family members and collaborators are introduced in talking-head form to add their recollections and assessments. But though Williams admits his habit of aggressiveness, the occasional bout of arrogance and overconfidence and a fallow period when he unwisely tried to frame projects to appeal to different segments of the public, his overall approach is wildly enthusiastic about himself and his accomplishments, and the observations about him by others are almost universally positive—except when they confirm his own mea culpas. Negative aspects of his career—lawsuits, for instance—are virtually ignored, and even a break with Hugo is skirted over without explanation. This is most definitely an authorized biography—Williams himself is one of the producers, after all—and whatever warts are allowed to make an appearance are quickly shunted off the stage.
But the sanitizing process, which includes reworking song lyrics for reasons of content, is made more palatable than it would otherwise be by the LEGO format. It’s simply fun to see Williams, Neville and all those talking heads converted into chunkily animated terms, and the backgrounds with them. Even music videos that will be familiar to most viewers are “converted,” an engaging treat for fans. The result is a colorful phantasmagoria, spiffily edited by Jason Zeldes, Aaron Wickenden and Oscar Vazquez to Williams’ songs and a score by Michael Andrews, that almost makes one forgive its simplifications, the banality of the comments by most of the talking heads, and the points toward the close when it comes close to being a commercial for Louis Vuitton.
Like a LEGO construction, “Piece by Piece” has been carefully assembled to be a portrait of Pharrell Williams’ unbounded creativity that will encourage viewers—especially youngsters—to dream big and swing for the fences. It’s a portrait that’s been retouched to remove, or at least diminish, any blemishes and emphasize the highlights. But as feel-good, toe-tapping family entertainment, it will fill the bill for many.