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Piece By Piece review – heartfelt biopic of Pharrell Williams’s life … in Lego

The remarkable story of a brilliant musician and producer is told in this surreal but also strangely wrongheaded film

This is a film that is boisterously childlike, surreal and eager to please, but also (I couldn’t help thinking) a strangely wrongheaded attempt to use Lego graphics to tell the remarkable, complex story of a brilliant musician and producer. The Lego Movies took cartoony fictional figures and endowed with them with an uncanny humanoid depth, but this seems to be doing the opposite: taking the very real intelligence and nuance of Williams and flattening them out, transforming that handsome, charismatic and sensitive face into something Lego-generic, with the C-shape Lego-hands disproportionately big and all wrong for playing a musical instrument. At the beginning and the end, Pharrell ponders the feeling that the universe and our consciousness of it is a huge Lego set, an array of prefabricated entities and emotions that we can only rearrange … but that this is liberating, because it lets us change what we don’t like.

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