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

Pharrell Williams’s life … only it’s Lego. A fun idea – like Muhammad Ali in Etch-a-Sketch or Harry and Meghan with Thunderbirds puppets. 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. Try as I might, I couldn’t make friends with this much-acclaimed film.

Piece By Piece is of course inspired by the amazing success of The Lego Movie franchise but doesn’t have those films’ crazy ironic knowingness or comedy stylings. On the contrary it is a basically heartfelt approach to Williams’s story, using real voices on the soundtrack but with Lego dramatisations of episodes in his life, as well as Lego dramatisations of one-to-one interviews with director Morgan Neville. 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.