Piece by Piece (2024)

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My earliest awareness of Pharrell Williams’ music came circa 2004, but in the most obscure way possible. Despite producing some of my favorite tracks from the likes of Usher, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, and No Doubt, Pharrell, along with his production team The Neptunes, wasn’t the name I had attached to these zeitgeisty songs. Instead, his N.E.R.D. side project was my entry point to arguably the most prolific beat maker in rap history. As a student of both hip-hop and rock, I’d never heard both genres blended in a way that couldn’t be categorized as either.

It seems almost destined for Pharrell to go from the most desired hip-hop hit-maker at the turn of the century to a household name in about a decade’s time. As hip-hop’s first superstar producer, he transcended the idea of what a beat maker could be, becoming an artist and an icon in his own right. His voice and persona were featured on other artist’s tracks at a time when producers were all but faceless instrumentalists behind the scenes.

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His self-produced documentary Piece by Piece details his discovery of music as a kid in Virginia Beach and paints a desirable picture of the scene at that time. He came to prominence alongside other well-known creatives like Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Pusha T, and of course his Neptunes partner Chad Hugo.

Aside from telling Pharrell’s life story, the selling point of the documentary is its delivery. As he and others narrate their own take on past events, we watch these sequences play out in LEGO-ized animation. Even the sit-down interviews themselves are presented as LEGOs.

For any creative individual, the highlight of the movie is this first leg in Virginia Beach during the early-‘90s. The LEGO set design allows us to live in this world as if immersed into a diorama of sorts, jealous that we couldn’t have been there to experience it first hand. We totally grasp the vibe that was permeating during this burgeoning creative period. And this is where the value of the unique LEGO concept becomes realized. It allows us to be teleported to these scenes as a fly on a wall, visualizing the poetic, wistful essence of a very real history. A standard live-action recreation or dramatization simply couldn’t have worked in the same way, to the point that it wouldn’t have even been worth the effort.

As for any fans of Pharrell or his music, the rest of the film is enjoyable as essentially an elongated Greatest Hits infomercial. The quartet of writers here — Morgan Neville (who also directs), Jason Zeldes, Aaron Wickenden, and Oscar Vazquez — makes sure to touch on most of the producer’s major hits over the years, which is a highly enjoyable experience, even if only for the wave of nostalgia brought upon by its musical sample platter. The tracks that Neville didn’t feel the need to elaborate on still get wedged in via a medley montage that recreates pieces of each respective music video. The Neptunes worked with everyone from Mariah Carey to Snoop Dogg, each appearing in LEGO form, often voiced by the real-life celebrity.

Piece by Piece is an engaging chronology of an American icon. However, at some point, it becomes clear this icon’s story has no period at the end of it — only an ellipsis. With nowhere to go, the narrative acquiesces into a brief stretch of Pharrell’s successful career where he felt disengaged creatively. If this were a biopic told 50 years from now, this gap would almost be sequestered as a footnote. Yet, it’s the only real conflict worth highlighting by a producer who might just be too close to his autobiographical project.

What we don’t often get in these music documentaries is the admission of creative inefficiencies, and so we curiously follow this intriguing trajectory through to the other side. However, I do wish there were more concrete examples of these failures outside of how our Pharrell merely felt at the time. A linear story such as this doesn’t really call for a sudden deep-dive into our subject’s existential crises and insecurities unless they can directly relate to actual temporal circumstances being discussed. In other words, we hardly care about the issue despite it being the only iota of drama throughout the film.

The final 20 minutes vacillate between fizzling and meandering. Piece by Piece often feels disjointed, especially by the end as Pharrell fails to properly wrap up his own saga, haphazardly tying his musical and ontological journeys into the Ferguson, Missouri police shooting of 2014. However, his struggles as a black man in America hadn’t been part of the subtext or context of the story chosen for us thus far, yet now become the crux of the conclusion of his dissertation. It suddenly becomes clear that the team of writers behind this project didn’t have any real thematic bedrock on which to stabilize this kaleidoscope of swirling ideas.

As such, we really come to no tangible conclusion by the end of it all. Since we don’t really get a solid reason why he experienced this creative drought, citing general arrogance and egocentrism as the main cause, we don’t have anything to chew on after Pharrell gets resurrected from the proverbial ashes. We’re told, “Relevance is a drug.” But Pharrell’s “relevance” is never what’s actually called into question.

Blurring the line between documentary and dramatization, Piece by Piece is an inspiring film that devolves into a boilerplate VH1 behind-the-scenes episode. While I thoroughly enjoy the first two-thirds of the film, I’m not sure how relevant any of it would be to someone who wasn’t surrounded by Y2K-era pop music. Outside his humble beginnings, Pharrell’s tale isn’t all that different from most other glorified musicians. Still, the experience of watching Piece by Piece is a sensory treat where music, colors, and motion blend together in a unique way. You see, the LEGOs can be a metaphor for the nuanced mosaic of one’s life… or just a fun way to tell a story.