Kulture Korner: "Piece by Piece" Review

By: Jungha Kwon

Piece by Piece (2024)

Directed by: Morgan Neville

Written by: Morgan Neville

Starring: Pharrell Williams, Morgan Neville, Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z

THE KELLOGGIAN'S RATING: 3.5 cereals / 5 cereals

Now, I feel like Nas right before recording “N.Y. State of Mind.” Piece by Piece stands out as an unconventional film—unexpected for a LEGO movie. While we’ve seen many LEGO-themed films over the years—several of them quite remarkable—it is unprecedented for one to be built around a series of interviews. Indeed, this film is constructed from interviews with pop star Pharrell Williams and people close to him. Since it adopts an autobiographical framework rooted in first-person testimony, there is no fixed story arc. Instead, the spotlight remains firmly on Pharrell’s life.

Movie poster, created by Nicolas Carlier

The film is structured chronologically, tracing the musician’s path from childhood to the present day. Each stage is framed by his unwavering pursuit of music. What begins as personal passion progressively broadens into a meditation on music’s social influence. In his earlier life, the film vividly portrays music’s impact at an individual level. Pharrell’s synesthetic perception—the way he experiences music as colors—is depicted through bold visuals, making the audience understand why he became so deeply immersed in sound from the very beginning.

One especially inventive device is the visualization of music through LEGO itself. Pharrell’s creative process is depicted as pieces coming together in assemblage, with different colored bricks and lights symbolizing rhythm and tone. Music is not treated as an abstract entity but as a tangible object, built and shared piece by piece, sometimes literally boxed and sent away as LEGO blocks. The film’s title, Piece by Piece, finds its first and most literal meaning here. For Pharrell, this act of building music and sending it into the world brings both joy and purpose, making music not merely art but a reason to live. In this sense, the film transcends the category of “music documentary” to become an allegory for human existence: just as LEGO allows infinite creative possibility, so too do we build our lives piece by piece.

Source: IMDb

In the final sequence, staying true to the LEGO metaphor, Pharrell dismantles a car and rebuilds it into a plane declaring, “When you don’t understand. Take it apart, brick by brick, and put it back together. It makes sense.” It encapsulates the essence of the film: life, music, and even society are infinite in possibility, provided we are willing to reassemble the pieces in new ways.

For all its merits, the film is not without shortcomings. Because the narrative relies almost exclusively on Pharrell’s own interviews, it presents his life through his subjective lens. This means the darker aspects of his journey are not sharply examined. That is not necessarily a flaw—biographical films are not obliged to be exposés. Yet some sequences, especially those emphasizing outside exploitation or external pressures during his hardships, risk oversimplifying the causes of his struggles. In comparison, Robbie Williams’s biopic Better Man, which deals more explicitly with inner conflict, highlights this film’s relative lack of deeper self-examination. Still, since the main focus here is music, this omission does not critically undermine the film’s impact.

Ultimately, Piece by Piece is a film about possibility. LEGO represents limitless creation, whether or not we follow the instruction manual. As Pharrell suggests, when things don’t make sense, we may need to disassemble and rebuild until they do. Music, society, even personal identity.

Writing this review itself felt like building with LEGO: at first, I did not know how to begin, much like Nas before recording. Yet by building small pieces of thought one after another, I arrived at the finished work right in front of you. Similarly, we are LEGO pieces in the great product that is society. This is why we embark on journeys like the MBA experience: to create vibrant LEGO pieces for the future. What we build with these pieces is entirely up to us.