Director: Morgan Neville
Cast: Pharrell Williams, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, Pusha T, N.O.R.E., Daft Punk, Gwen Stefani
Screenplay: Morgan Neville, Oscar Vazquez, Aaron Wickenden, Jason Zeldes
93 mins. Rated PG.

Morgan Neville (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) is kind of a documentary rock star. His various films, many of them biographical tales of the most captivating people in our society, have always pushed the envelope, oftentimes testing the limits of what can be done within the field of documentary film-making. His newest, a unique story of musical genius Pharrell Williams, is his most ambitious experiment yet, for better and worse.

In detailing the major events in the life of Pharrell Williams, the musician asks Neville, Wouldn’t it be cool if this was all in LEGOs, and there you have it. For the next 90 minutes, Pharrell’s very animated life becomes…well, animated with LEGOs.

I kept asking myself throughout this movie was the question of where does a documentary end and a traditional biopic begin? I think the traditional documentary format is shaken to its core by the idea of animating the elements discussed with LEGOs, and I think that Neville’s film gains a lot of style at the expense of some heart. Seeing the little minifigures maneuvering the film created some distance and may have had the opposite effect at times from what Neville and Williams were going for. The movie never really justifies the existence of the LEGO gimmick, and Pharrell just keeps bringing up how cool that would be.

Piece by Piece has some highlights, including a great scene where Williams is hanging out with Snoop Dogg and enjoying some “PG Spray” in lieu of drug use in a PG film. I also enjoyed the visual representation of Williams’s beats. When it’s embracing the inherent silliness of its concept, the movie is winning, but it doesn’t accomplish this often enough.

Still, the story is interesting enough, highlighting all the artists who have had work touched by the incredibly artistic musician. It’s here where I think the film diverted from its documentary style, as it spends a lot of time with past events being recreated instead of captured on film, including a sequence where Pharrell dreams about having a conversation with Carl Sagan. It’s interesting, but I’m not really sure about a lot of the “factual” accounts being discussed.

There’s no doubt that Neville is a boundary-pusher, and while Piece by Piece doesn’t fully succeed as a documentary, it works wonders as an experimental piece of cinema that we’re unlikely to get again any time soon.

3/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

For my review of Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, click here.