Lego therefore I am: Pharrell Williams talks about himself with bricks

We have seen many biographical films like “Piece by Piece”, yet at the same time it is almost unique in a specific cinematic genre: that of musical biographical films that reconstruct the brilliant careers of music stars. A line made up of many films that have an unpleasant, recurring flaw: the excessive repetitiveness of their formats and approaches. Each of these films promises to tell the story of a unique artist in her genre and her battles, only to then tell us about it in exactly the same way as all the others. The homologation that kills creativity in the story of creativity itself.

The format chosen by songwriter and singer Pharrell Williams is apparently the most classic of all: a one-on-one chat about his life with his interviewerwho is also the documentary maker and director of the film. Morgan Neville is someone who has a story in his blood, who makes documentaries on a bit of everything and in the past has also tried his hand at music (one of the most detailed reconstructions of the history of Iggy Pop and the Stooges). One who in the past has not hesitated to distort the form of a doc to enhance the uniqueness of the subject he was talking about.

Pharrell, for his part, had imagined telling his personal and musical story since 2013, but he didn’t know how, or rather he couldn’t find anyone who didn’t laugh at his – very serious – statement of wanting to do it with Lego bricks. Then 2019 arrives, the pandemic explodes, a lot of remote interviews are done to keep in touch with the public, to try not to isolate yourself, at least verbally; normal people, artists, pop stars besieged by isolation. Talking about yourself, talking to others, to feel close.

When Morgan Neville interviews him and Pharrell brings up his idea about the biopic with Lego bricks, the documentarian reacts surprised, but doesn’t get defensive. Then the singer-songwriter realizes he has found the right person. The scene is recreated at the start of “Piece by piece”, just to reiterate how it is not a choice of strange form but empty of meaning. Since Pharrell had the idea, various animated films have arrived in theaters in which characters, buildings and objects are reconstructed with bricks. If a film can tell Batman with Legos, because toy bricks cannot tell the story of an African-American teenager who grew up in the public housing of Virginia Beach, looked askance at by peers because he is “weird”?

The risk with choices of this type is to do something sui generis to mitigate the banality of the current operation. “Piece by Piece” avoids this risk immediately, despite having a very traditional approach. There is Pharrell who talks about his professional journey through ups and downs, there are superstar friends who tell how they created hits together with him from top ten – Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani, Snoop Dogg. There’s even his wife. who reconstructs how she became his sweetheart by standing out among a swarm of girls who ogled Pharrell once success had kissed him.

Nevertheless it is precisely the “legoization” of Pharrell’s story that makes “Piece by Piece” perfect for telling its artistic and musical quality. It works very well, for example, to visually convey the synesthesia that characterizes his relationship with music from a very young age. In fact, Pharrell is among those “sees” the colors of music with his mind, a unique process that he considered natural as a child. While he was fascinated by pieces like Steve Wonder’s classics, seeing their colors, standing very close to the speaker, Pharrell thought that all other African-American teenagers experienced music in an all-encompassing and visual way like him.

When the film tells us about his approach to the musical world, his irrepressible and bulimic creativity, it shows us that puts together strange colored bricks to form the songs that he will propose to other artists, while the frustration grows inside him at not being able to present his music, his songs himself. At that moment we understand that the choice of Lego is a winning one. That pile of strangely shaped bricks that the little yellow men with the recognizable features of the artists of the 90s and 00s American scene pass from hand to hand, recognizing it as “a piece of Pharrell”, is the creative twist that was needed. Simple, effective, almost obvious in hindsight, as are his catchphrases, the genesis of which is told here in the most traditional of ways.

In the documentary that tells it Pharrell presents himself and labels himself as the slightly weird one, strongly tied to his family, capable of expressing that emotion – by Oprah Winfrey and in interviews – which is carefully hidden in her circle of music star friends. The arrival at “Happy”, his catchphrase par excellence, inspired by the happiness painted on the first child’s face, is almost a natural goal of this narrative.

However, there is also space to recognize its roots, to talk about the racism experienced in the music industry and then amplified in the world through music.

The most impressive passage of “Piece by piece”, however, is not in the film, but in an interview that the artist gave to the “Variety” podcast, telling how this documentary was born. An interview in which he explains because he voluntarily objectified himself, standardized as a little yellow Lego man. To the inevitable question about the choice to tell his story with bricks, Pharrell replied: “I could tell you a lot of banal things: the playfulness, the connection with childhood. The truest answer, however, is that I voluntarily let myself be objectified, I let my story become a toy, take on recurring, stereotyped, standardized traits. I did it for the kid me who had no yardstick for how he felt about music, who was made to feel weird.”

Piece by Piece exists, in Pharrell’s words, not so much to celebrate itself, but because from now on there is a movie for a movie for African American kids who feel the way he felt. An ironic, brilliant, colourful, at times adolescent film, which can reach them, so that they know that it is absolutely normal to have this deep, special, almost all-encompassing relationship with music and the human emotions it describes. Even if you are a young man, even if you are African American.