Piece by Piece is 2024’s Most Surprising (and Inspiring) Movie
He’s often called a visionary, but even Pharrell’s biggest fans weren’t expecting his life story in LEGO. It’s a choice that turns out to be genius.
good.film
3 months ago
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Straight up, there’s a burning question about Piece by Piece that we just have to address. It’s not “why do a documentary about Pharrell Williams?” – that bit’s easy. The American muso is a multi-hyphenate force of nature. He’s had smash hits as a solo artist, collaborator, producer and movie songwriter (Happy, the joyous earworm from Despicable Me that landed him an Oscar nomination, barely scratches the surface).
He’s also the brain behind some of the biggest career hits for OTHER artists: Snoop’s Drop It Like It's Hot, Gwen’s Hollaback Girl, Kelis’ Milkshake and Daft Punk’s Get Lucky all started life in his cerebral cortex. Pharrell’s a visionary. Some call him a genius. A cross-generational creative superstar. One of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World. No, the question is: WHY make a documentary about Pharrell… in LEGO? Is this what the era of millennial parenthood looks like?
We pretty much get our answer when Pharrell sits down to speak with documentarian Morgan Neville. Actually, it's the animated LEGO version of himself that sits down, because every single frame of this doco – from the people, to the music studios, to the magical beats themselves – is rendered in the colourful style of the famously popular Danish building blocks. And like a great LEGO set, the very first words he says just make everything CLICK:
"Y'know what I always wondered about?” Pharrell ponders. “What if life wasn't new? You just build it from pieces. You're borrowing from colours that already existed. Like a LEGO set."
A note to parents and carers: it’s totally okay to take your little ones along to Piece by Piece. It’s rated PG, and the style is identical – shiny, cheeky and unmistakably LEGO – so they’ll have a fantastic time. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s yet another cute, light-hearted entry in the (pretty fantastic) series of LEGO movies that have hit screens over the last decade.
Instead, it’s an encapsulation of one of the millennium’s most unpredictable musical talents, from first steps to now – his influences and first successes; his missteps and global hits. And it’s not a Pharrell hagiography either: the failures, the dodgy choices and the trappings of fame all get a run. But it’s the explosive kaleidoscope of visual creativity that makes Piece by Piece stand out.
There’s arguably no more creative medium than animation, and you can feel the freedom it gives Neville to tell Pharrell’s story. It just about leaps off the screen. The whole “LEGO thing” is a bizarre choice, but it makes sensational sense when you get to know Pharrell and figure out how his mind ticks. Of course the guy who crosses genres (R&B, pop, disco) and generations (from adult hip-hop tracks to beloved kids’ movies) can’t be contained to one medium…
Early on, Pharrell tells us “I knew I was different. I've always grappled with that.” Who can’t relate, right? But in his case, it’s a true difference: Pharrell has synesthesia, a phenomenon that causes sensory crossovers (like “tasting colors” or “feeling sounds” – other musicians like Lorde, Billie Eilish and Kanye West have it too). In Pharrell’s case he sees musical notes and beats as a wild array of lights and colours that burst from the speakers and surround him.
So while you’d expect a Pharrell flick to SOUND killer, Piece by Piece has stunning visuals to match. Over a Stevie Wonder groove (another artist who has synesthesia, by the way), we see what Pharrell sees – “beautiful hues of light, cascading” and entrancing him as a 7th grader. The way Pharrell describes it, “Music literally was mesmerising to me.” Anyone else jealous??
It’s this key that unlocks the movie version of Pharrell’s life, letting us see through his eyes with absolutely no visual or creative restraints. So a vocal can "look" like a tsunami of crystal-blue water. He floats in church as a kid, suspended in the air, drifting to the stars with the gospel music. Lights shoot out of his drum kit, and when he mixes beats, they’re glowing objects; golden gems that he carries around like audible treasure. Hey, isn’t every great song kinda like a precious gem?
Using the LEGO universe gives Piece by Piece the freedom to bring Pharrell’s key emotional highs and lows to life in ways that just aren’t possible (or would be laughable) in a real film. Like when a big-time producing studio comes to town, the building literally lands in Pharrell’s ‘hood like a spaceship. When he creates, he takes chunks of vapor trails from passing jet planes, or pieces of the moon. In one of the film’s funniest moments, Pharrell plays one of his early demo tapes to a big-time producer – and it blows his LEGO-shaped head clean off.
When success comes, Pharrell’s so in-demand (from names like Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Madonna, and Beyoncé) that he stays put in one studio, while the recording booths whizz past like a revolving door behind the glass. Later on, he creates a literal collision of culture – with hip-hop and pop culture divided on two sides of a chasm, until the heaving earth crunches together and the crowds join as one.
Okay, so the visuals are RAD. But like we said, it’s not Puff Piece by Puff Piece. Neville keenly focuses on the challenges that faced a black kid from a housing project, from racial and economic, to self-doubt and fears. Pharrell bonds fiercely with Chad Hugo in school, who he describes as a “musical savant” and their instant rapport as being “like PB & J – it’s a weird new mixture, but new and exciting.” But the industry couldn’t peg the combo’s startlingly different electro-hip-hop style. One producer describes the pairing as “Two dudes, one Filipino and one black guy from Virginia Beach? That doesn't even make sense!”
They had zero studio etiquette, and even less financial responsibility. When Pharrell does land a $10K paycheque at 19 for writing on a surprise hit, he “blew it in like 2 weeks”. In meetings, we see his LEGO persona jumping around like a livewire, bouncing on desks, frantic with energy. Collectively, the industry has no clue what to do with this guy, let alone how to forge him into a marketable success. It’s a good example of how genre-defying artists don’t fit into marketing moulds; instead, they break the moulds and re-shape the market around them.
Montaged together, there’s five years of don’t call us, we’ll call you. At least that’s how Pharrell saw it: "I chose to look at it the wrong way, like I was being rejected. I didn't realise I was being told to work harder." The section where he insists on producing his breakout high-profile track Superthug is a fist-pumping ode to backing your own instincts. Pharrell purposely wanted to make hip-hop, but not LOOK like a hip-hop star – and it worked. “When Superthug dropped, everything changed, forever.”
As producing team The Neptunes, that “one Filipino and one black guy” won 3 Grammys and completely reshaped the sound of hip-hop, R&B, and pop music in the early 2000s. By 2003, they produced an astounding 43% of all the songs heard on American radio. You could argue that it was TOO much success – or maybe, a career’s worth of success that all came at once (Neville really brings that feeling to life by filling Pharrell’s LEGO recording studio with seawater, until the soundproof glass bursts and an ocean’s-worth of pressure comes flooding through).
There’s a good chunk of time devoted to the community that surrounded Pharrell during this rise – real interviews with all-stars like Missy Elliot, Snoop and Jay Z (in LEGO form, of course) tell us that “He was like the little brother we all wanted to protect.” Did they sense a kind of vulnerability in Pharrell? He admits that he struggled with the duality of becoming a known solo artist versus one-half of a producing supergroup. He even says he was scared. “What's my voice? What do I want to say?”
There’s an interesting notion here of hiding from “front facing” fame. Instead, Pharrell lapped up the behind-the-scenes successes of writing and producing massive hits for other artists (it’s reminiscent of SIA writing hits for established names like Rihanna, Britney, Kylie and Katy Perry before breaking out with her own smash, Chandelier). But like always, when you've got the pools and the private jets and the champagne popping, the creative drive gets diluted; distracted. Suddenly, Pharrell’s lost – doing tons of merchandising deals for liquor brands, designing shoes and skateboards, and chasing easy chart hits.
His mates describe the sudden change in him, using language like being busy with it, real distracted, head’s in the clouds, way too much going on. And his urge to push into radio-friendly genre hits is confounding to his crew, who knew him as an artist who always prized originality over commerciality. As Pusha T puts it, “You're Pharrell, man! What are you doing?”
It can’t be a coincidence that Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines plays under this section – a song that Pharrell co-wrote and appeared on, but has since condemned for its problematic take on issues of consent and the objectification of women. It’s a have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too way of including a smash hit song in the film, without referencing it head on. The trade off means that subconsciously, the baggage of Blurred Lines underscores a period of Pharrell’s life that wasn't ideal either.
It all culminates with Pharrell floating in space – he’s lost his grounding; literally untethered. “The pieces just didn't fit anymore.” We’ve seen similar stories of cultural fame – a rocketship rise followed by excess and confusion – but what’s usually missing is the self-awareness to realise it. The easy phrase is to call it “selling out”, but Pharrell nails it in a more emotionally thoughtful way: it’s about needing to stay at the top of people’s MINDS, not the charts. “Relevance is a drug. And staying relevant has you doing all kinds of things just to stay there.”
The disconnect is easy to understand when you consider Pharrell’s background and upbringing: raised in Virginia, in a low-to-mid socioeconomic bracket, the son of a teacher and a handyman (who both appear in the film). He seems, at times, almost embarrassed about the flashy bits of being famous. Gradually, the sports cars and fancy ‘fits are traded out for deeper meaning: a home, a wife and a baby son. And if you think a newborn mini-Pharrell sounds cute, wait ‘til you see him in LEGO.
Funnily enough, that’s when Happy was also born. Inspired by his son Rocket, Happy was an uptempo soul smash that went to #1 in 25 countries, won a pair of Grammys and became the highest-selling song of 2014. But Piece by Piece leverages that success to open up the film’s most emotional section. Pharrell naturally loves the song, and seeing the fan-made videos of people singing along that hit socials from all over the world. But he acknowledges that the outpouring of joy was built on an undercurrent that blindsided him:
“Happy turned into this other thing that I didn't see coming. People are singing to highlight an emotion. But you realise why they FEEL that song – it’s because they've been through some SHIT. And it took a toll on me, seeing so much pain.”
That cues a surprise, and it’s the most powerful segment of Piece by Piece: George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed. It’s soundtracked by Pharrell’s innovative collaboration with Kendrick Lamar, the propulsive and urgent anthem Alright. With an almost marching-band chant of We gonna be alright, it makes total sense when Kendrick reflects that “There's something in that beat that feels like a statement.” For Pharrell, the event was a personal flashpoint. “It changed my outlook on what it means to be Black,” he narrates over the film’s (black & white) protest scenes. “You're in juxtaposition to the entire system. This is literally what we think about everyday.”
It’s a reality check that’s totemic of the whole Pharrell ethos: finding inspiration – you could even say a silver lining – within darkness and pain. On paper, it might seem like a reach to include a Black Lives Matter section in a LEGO movie, but it’s actually another reason the choice of format was inspired. When we let our guard down to experience fun, we’re also letting deeper messages in. Maybe framing this acknowledgement within a widely-appealing CGI story was the strategy all along?
It definitely fits with Pharrell’s concept of finding power in like-minded people. “There's strength in numbers,” he tells Neville in a final piece-to-camera interview. “To inspire people to be aspirational, you don't just inspire up, you inspire left and right as well – that's what creates community. Without that? Yeah, that's where we break down.”
If you (or a kid you know) has even a scrap of creative DNA, there’s masses of inspiration to take from this unique and often extraordinary film. There’s the classic (undeniably satisfying) trope of weird kid makes it – in his own words, Pharrell says he’s “an odd child from the mud – a housing project – but really, that place was magical”.
Then there’s the wildly imaginative way that Morgan Neville gets the breadth of Pharrell’s talent up on the screen. The same way that The Sound of Metal made us experience deafness, or The Father helped us feel dementia, Piece by Piece just “gets” synesthesia. It’s so smart to show Pharrell’s distinct tracks as magically glowing brick shapes – each beat is unique, formed from the same blocks, but assembled in a way that's entirely new (echoing his opening statement). Oh, and make sure you hit up a theatre with great speakers – the dynamic range of Pharrell’s career tunes sound absolutely incredible in surround sound.
Like so many super-talents, Pharrell didn’t fit in as a kid; detached, in dreamland, and wanting to escape. Mission accomplished: Piece by Piece is 90 minutes of fantastic escape, from the cleverest of visual gags (like the “PG Spray” that clouds the room when he meets notorious smoke-advocate Snoop Dogg – brilliant) to the thematic depth of finding his own cultural reckoning.
Non-music fans might be tempted to wave Piece by Piece away, but with its focus on the energy we share and the space we occupy, it’s a surprisingly holistic experience for anyone. It’s not so much a film about music as it is about inspiration. And Pharrell Williams sees that everywhere he looks. “We're just vibrating, buzzing molecules,” he offers at his career story’s finale. “Life is much bigger than you. One day you wake up and you realise that this was all designed. And because it was designed, there's potential for you to change it.”
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