‘I’m humble now, but it tells you the story of how I became humble.’ With that magnificent faux modesty, Pharrell Williams provides the synopsis for a hero’s journey that’s rendered entirely in Lego animation. On paper, it sounds completely bonkers – The Lego Movie, only a biopic – but it somehow works a treat. Packed with the super-producer’s pop bangers, punctuating its music biz self-importance with consistent silliness, and laden with A-list cameos, including Lego Snoop Dogg, Lego Missy Elliott and most of the noughties hip hop scene (also Lego), it’s a real joyride. Hopefully it’ll inspire a few more docs to deviate from the boring old biopic formula.
Pharrell invited 20 Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville to shoot a standard documentary, complete with a meaty central interview with the man himself, and then bin it and remake the whole thing in Danish bricks. It works for two reasons: the primary colours and charmingly daffy animation technique fits its endearing subject to a tee. His genius, it charts, began with his synesthesia – an ability to see music in colours – and the Lego animation illustrates it better than a regular doc ever could.
And it turns out that it’s way more fun hearing A-listers intoning about their musical genius when they’re Lego-fied. A Snoop Dogg cameo has a little Lego figure appearing with a canister of ‘PG spray’ to replicate the moment when Pharrell and his Neptunes/N.E.R.D. co-producer Chad Hugo had a woozy meeting with the weed-smoking Doggfather. An ice-cream parlour in Pharrell’s native Virginia Beach is painstakingly animated just because one of the film’s interviewees picks an ice-cream metaphor at random.
Hopefully it’ll inspire more docs to deviate from the boring old formula
But for all the good vibes here, Pharrell’s career hasn’t been without non-PG material and the film fails to dig into the more controversial moments. His misogynistic lyrics to Robin Thicke’s 2013 megahit ‘Blurred Lines’ landed him in the midst of a #MeToo storm, but it gets swerved altogether (though the song gets an airing).
It’s an omission that will put a few people off, and a chance missed for this mostly charming and likeable doc to tackle a rare controversy head-on. Because in other moments, Pharrell opens up movingly, about family life (sweetly, he addresses his son as ‘sir’) and his career frustrations and moments of despondence. M ost of all, it’s a colourful journey lit up with great tunes and a deep love of music – an ingenious, infectious new spin on the music doc. Now let’s have Diplo in Duplo.
In UK cinemas Nov 8.