Morgan Neville has endured an unusual rise in the history of documentary filmmakers. He became one of America’s only celebrity documentarians with his critically acclaimed 2018 film Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which took on heightened importance as an expression of kindness and neighborliness in the heat of the culture wars of the time.
His other work is quite excellent as well. 20 Feet From Stardom, Best of Enemies, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, and Roadrunner are all timely and hotly discussed works of pop history that raised nuanced conversations about the legacies of complicated figures like Orson Welles, William F. Buckley, and Anthony Bourdain (even if some of his hot takes are a bit controversial and one-sided at points). He even seems to be set to knock it out of the park again with his upcoming Paul McCartney documentary Man On The Run.
It’s a shame though that his most recent film hasn’t received as much love. Piece By Piece was released on October 11 and on video-on-demand less than three weeks after failing to make its $16 million budget at the box office. Now that the movie is available for streaming, it is well worth a second look!
Content Guide
Violence/Scary Images: Limited to none.
Language/Crude Humor: Some language including G**, h***, d***, and s***.
Drug/Alcohol References: Allusions to alcohol and weed consumption.
Sexual Content: Song lyrics are included with sexual content, but no explicit content is depicted.
Spiritual Content: The lead character is depicted attending a Black church and having a strong relationship with his pastor, although religious themes are absent after he becomes famous.
Other Negative Content: Themes of decadence, indulgence, and materialistic lifestyles, as well as implicit drug use and implied sexuality.
Positive Content: Themes of authenticity, hope, family, and being rooted.
Review
The musical biopic is a dead and dying genre. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story put it in its grave. The genre that started with Walk The Line became popularized in the 2010s with films like Straight Outta Compton. It reached its peak with mega successes like Bohemian Rhapsody, Elvis, and Rocket Man, but now the genre has mostly fizzled out. This year’s Back To Black and Bob Marley: One Love have both been critical failures. The genre as a whole has entered its deconstruction stage, with parody films like the Weird Al biopic spoofing it to the point that the integrity of the unironic music biopic is losing steam.
It is a shame then that a film like Piece By Piece has to be a victim of declining Hollywood trends. It sits in a unique position as a film that’s simultaneously a sincere biopic about one man’s success and a light-hearted parody that happens to believe that the most authentic way to tell this man’s story is in the medium of animated LEGOs.
Piece By Piece is the story of Pharrell Williams, the mega-successful hip hop artist and popstar behind #1 hit songs like Happy and Fronting. On paper, it’s a very conventional rags-to-riches story of a young man from Virginia Beach working his way to the top, getting the opportunity to write backup tracks for Jay-Z, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, Prince, Justin Timberlake, Daft Punk, and Kendrick Lamar, getting cocky, breaking up his band by getting arrogant, selling out, and then finding a second wind in his career by digging deeper and writing more authentic songs that take him to new heights of success.
In execution, the fact that it’s told entirely with the animation used by The LEGO Movie makes it both sillier and more authentic. It’s far more expressionistic, imaginative, and joyful than a conventional documentary could ever be. The movie, co-produced by Universal Studios as part of its recent push to produce more LEGO Movie sequels following Warner Bros. putting the franchise to bed, marks one of Neville’s most visually creative films. He’s taken Pharrel’s spur-of-the-moment instinct that his life story needs to be told in LEGOs to its logical conclusion and uses that format for a remarkable animated film.
Most of the proceedings just look like they shot actual MTV-style interviews with the celebrities and figures in question and animated them. It’s a fascinating flex for this animation style, which worked to great effect in The LEGO Movie and The LEGO Batman Movie as a vehicle for children’s adventure movies but shows here how versatile that animation style can be in the context of a non-fiction biopic.
At times, the fact that it’s entirely animated in LEGOs does create issues when it comes to more serious topics. The world of hip-hop is famous for its obscene subject matter and vulgar characters, and it lampshades the fact that it’s making a PG movie by making that squeaky clean image part of the joke. When Pharrell gets a meeting with Snoop Dog, an intern walks across the screen spraying the room with “PG Spray”. At other times, the real world seeps in too much. Seeing LEGO depictions of the George Floyd protests almost seems to be coming too close to the edge of its PG premise, even though it’s clearly an important part of Pharrell’s journey. It’s the kind of TOO REAL you can’t lampshade and feels a bit awkward to reenact with LEGOs.
Thankfully, Pharrell does a good job keeping the whole project feeling cohesive and unified around his image. It’s a story about wild flights of fancy, extravagance, and ambition, and this execution allows it to be a story that equally shows the heights of desire and success with the lows of being pulled back down to Earth and searching for something authentic. This really is an excellent match of medium and message, particularly for an artist famous for a song called Happy.
As he told NPR, telling his story with LEGOs just felt right. “My earliest memories were the Lego sets that my parents would get me when I was really, really, really young. Whether you actually really build what the set is all about or you’re just putting pieces together … it’s just magical.” He affirms this clearly in the film’s opening monologue. Life is what you make of it and how you build it.
It is a shame that Piece By Piece got eaten up by a poor box office year that’s destroyed many of our greatest filmmakers. In a year where Furiosa, Horizon, Borderlands, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, The Fall Guy, The Crow, and Harold And The Purple Crayon couldn’t survive at the box office, a Pharrell Williams biopic was doomed. It’s a rough industry right now, particularly in the fledgling music biopics genre. Even The LEGO Movie 2 struggled when it was released five years ago. Thankfully, the movie is available now to rent and it is well worth supporting!
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