[COLUMN] In Piece by Piece, Pharrell Williams and LEGO Are a Perfect Fit | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Piece by Piece is a fairly conventional music documentary from veteran director Morgan Neville. It is, on paper, familiar ground for the documentarian, who had previously directed the Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom, a portrait of the unsung back-up vocalists who provide so much to the music industry. Piece by Piece is a study of musician Pharrell Williams, charting his life and career. This is fairly standard stuff except for one little thing: it is also entirely animated in LEGO.

Much of the press around the movie, and the narrative of the film itself, credits Williams with this unconventional approach to a very conventional subject matter. “Everyone was doing them at the time, and I was like, ‘Hell no.’ I never want to do what everybody else is doing,” Williams explained of his resistance to doing a traditional biopic. “But when he finally said the magic words, ‘You can do it any way you want,’ I knew deep down inside that I wanted to do it through LEGO.”

Still, the decision was probably welcomed by Universal, which signed an exclusive five-year deal with LEGO in 2020 to produce films based around the toy. While LEGO’s global entertainment head Jill Wilfer insists Universal “are true fans of the brand”, there has been little movement on LEGO films at the studio. That deal didn’t include any of the intellectual property used in the LEGO Movie franchise at Warner Bros., and so Piece by Piece is the first LEGO film to be released by Universal. (Editor’s Note: The night before publishing this piece, Universal announced a trio of LEGO projects from directors Jake Kasdan, Patty Jenkins, and Joe Cornish.)

Taken on its own merits, Piece by Piece is charming. Neville knows how to tell an accessible and light-hearted story about the music industry, Williams is an engaging and charismatic subject, his life is honestly quite interesting, and the use of LEGO helps to keep things visually engaging. Piece by Piece is playful and inventive. It also has a great soundtrack. It’s tempting to look at it as a companion piece to Better Man, the upcoming musical biopic of Robbie Williams that will find the star playing himself as a computer-generated ape.

On the one hand, this feels like an inevitable response to the market saturation of the traditional musical biopic. Over the past few years, cinemas have been flooded with paint-by-numbers retellings of the lives of iconic and beloved singers, set to toe-tapping soundtracks: Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, One Love, Back to Black, Get on Up, I Saw the Light, All Eyez on Me, Straight Outta Compton, Respect.

These are studies of compelling subjects. Part of what makes an artist so interesting is their uniqueness, the parts of their identity that cannot be reduced to a clean three-act structure. These biopics sand down the edges of their leads, flattening them into an easily-digestible form. The beats and rhythms of these kinds of movies are so familiar that there have been multiple parodies of the formula, including Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

These movies are reliable, even in turbulent times. This year alone, One Love grossed an impressive $180m on a $70m budget and Back to Black earned just over $50m on a $30m budget. These aren’t quite the highs of Bohemian Rhapsody ($900m on a $52m budget) or Rocketman ($195m on a $40m budget), but these returns are nothing to sneeze at. Piece by Piece and Better Man feels like an attempt to shake up a genre that runs the risk of turning stale.

However, there is a sense in which Piece by Piece is a logical extension of the modern musical biopic. After all, The LEGO Movie was an early example of the trend of product-focused cinema, which would later expand to include projects like Barbie. Many of these movies adopted the rhythms and structures of the conventional biographical film, just built around brands: AIR, Tetris, BlackBerry and Flamin’ Hot. They even got their own parody in Unfrosted. Just call them “buy-o-pics.”

Piece by Piece is beholden to the LEGO brand. The company reportedly pushed for a PG rating, even over a PG-13. Neville has openly acknowledged that the film makes several concessions to the family-friendly product. “So I knew that I couldn’t have a Lego joint in the film,” Neville explains. “Things like that I just knew I couldn’t ever do.” This admittedly leads to some very charming jokes, as Snoop Dogg’s entourage fill the air with “PG Spray” rather than anything harder.

Of course, given Neville’s approach, Piece by Piece was unlikely to ever be a particularly hard-hitting look at Pharrell Williams. In keeping with the musician’s brand, everything is “Happy.” Anything that might be uncomfortable or challenging is stripped out of the film. The soundtrack includes Williams’ massively successful collaboration with Robin Thicke, “Blurred Lines”, but the subject of the song and the other singer are never even acknowledged. It would just serve to bring the mood down.

Williams concedes that the documentary is not a particularly rigorous or faithful study of his career. In the musician’s own words, the movie “paraphrases” his life. There are lots of lovely personal details scattered in the film, with very disarming conversations with collaborators and family members, but there is a sense that Piece by Piece is as dedicated to protecting Williams’ brand just as much as LEGO’s reputation.

This is par for the course with modern musical biographies. These films are not self-contained entities. Just as a tour is really just “the most reliable way to stimulate sales of recordings”, these films are designed to drive audiences to the larger brand. According to Billboard, the release of Bohemian Rhapsody led to a massive spike in sales of Queen’s back catalogue. The band earned $18m in the six months following the film’s release, compared to $4.4m in the previous six months.

Musical biopics are the rare subgenre that still has an ancillary market. They can renew audience interest in an established performer. For living performers, they pave the way for a late career revival. After the success of Rocketman, Elton John was able to leverage a $30m payday from Disney for his farewell tour. For deceased artists, they can bolster sales and streams of the back catalogue, enriching the estate. Back to Black sent the eponymous album back to two separate Billboard charts.

As such, there is an understandable impulse to protect the brand. After all, the musicians and their estates hold considerable leverage in the production of these biographical films, because they can withhold the song rights. As the ill-fated David Bowie biopic Stardust demonstrated, nobody wants to see a biographical film about a musician that doesn’t include their iconic back catalogue. As a result, rights-holders tend to be actively involved in how the subjects of these films are presented.

This is very obvious just looking at the films. Bohemian Rhapsody was produced by the surviving members of Queen, and so makes sure to present those members of the band as genuinely concerned about the reckless decisions that Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) is making while also being very careful to stress that Brian May (Gwilym Lee), Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) and John Deacon (Joe Mazzello) certainly weren’t partaking in drugs, parties or extramarital affairs.

Next year will see the release of Antoine Fuqua’s Michael, a biopic of Michael Jackson (Jaafar Jackson). Given the involvement of the Jackson estate, there is a very real concern that the movie will downplay the very credible allegations of sexual abuse leveled at the musician. Documentarian Dan Reed, who directed the Leaving Neverland series, described the draft of the script that he read as “startlingly disingenuous” in its efforts to discredit Jackson’s accusers.

This profit motive has a demonstrable chilling effect on the projects being released. Documentarian Ezra Edelman won an Academy Award for directing O.J.: Made in America. Edelman recently produced a nine-hour documentary on Prince for Netflix, and the musician’s estate have blocked its release. According to those who have seen it, the documentary paints a complicated and compelling portrait of its subject. It seems it was too complicated a portrait for those in charge of his estate.

As such, these projects are less biography than they are hagiography. Piece by Piece imbues its subject with divine purpose. “God has given you a special gift,” Williams recalls his grandmother telling him. “But to whom much is given much is required.” Any flaws in Williams’ character are fleetingly acknowledged and never specified. Even the musician’s third act crisis is largely blamed on meddling by three anonymous suits rather than any decisions made by Williams himself.

At points, Piece by Piece skirts up against the limits of good taste. Towards the end of the movie, this LEGO documentary has to engage with the Black Lives Matter protests, which it depicts in austere black-and-white. Even then, Williams is cautious about being too overtly political. He can acknowledge his alienation from the system because of his race, but also repeatedly expresses his enthusiasm for the Blue Angels, the flight demonstration squadron of the American Navy.

Piece by Piece is very cognisant of its existence as part of a larger brand. The documentary devotes considerable space to Williams’ savvy sponsorship deals with companies outside of the music world. “He was endorsing high-end designers,” explains Shae Haley. “Artists weren't doing that back then.” Williams elaborates, “So what I am is a maverick. You know, I'm over here designing sunglasses for Louis Vuitton and working with Adidas and Chanel. I did a jingle for McDonald's.”

As such, Piece by Piece just feels like another brand partnership, with Williams lending his artistic credibility to LEGO in return for their profile and market access. It’s a very savvy business deal, two aligning interests intersecting within the confines of what is ostensibly a musical biographical documentary. As affable as it is, Piece by Piece is all product, packaged for ease of consumption. Appropriately enough for a documentary made in LEGO, these are just two pieces that fit together.