Pharrell Williams Lego Doc is a big toy story

Breaking into the Music business, composing incredibly addictive catchy hits, recognizing genre boundaries, starting a streetwear clothing line, wearing really big ranger hats – Pharrell Williams has never followed the rules. The boy from Virginia Beach, Virginia, had always felt like someone who saw (and heard) the world differently than his peers. As a youth growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, he was marked as something of an outsider with the label “He's so… unusual.” By the time Pharrell began creating oft-disturbed beats in the late 1990s and early 2000s as half of the red-hot production duo Neptunes, however, the whole thing had gone from bug to feature. He still occupies a singular place in modern pop music. Documentation was inevitable.

So perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise when the guy who helped us produce “Happy,” “Get Lucky” and much of the 21st Century soundtrack suggested that his cinematic Boswell, aka filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 feet from fame, won't you be my neighbor? (the current two-part document by Steve Martin) do something unique. According to the artist, life is like a kind of LEGO set, “in which you can assemble things however you want.” So why not tell the story of his rise from humble beginnings to becoming a hitmaker? with real LEGOs? It's an absolutely ridiculous idea to propose unless you're Williams. In this case, it's just another potential victory in a career full of proven success on the left side. People love LEGO Batman! And not all LEGO superheroes wear capes!

Whether or not this concept of turning Williams' life story into a literal toy story was the right move is debatable; We would classify it right in the middle between a gimmick and a stroke of genius. But you can't blame piece by piece It looks like another music documentary straight off the assembly line, even if it has all the typical beats of such a documentary. And given the way Williams describes his creative process, it's an ideal way to translate what's going on in his head into what you see on screen. The singer-songwriter-producer-fashionista (fill in the blank) suffers from a neurological condition called synesthesia, which allows him to experience music as a palette of colors. He “sees” a song’s melodies and polyrhythms, choruses and hooks, in bright bursts that ebb, fade, and occasionally explode into structural rainbows. Williams could tell you how he came up with the building blocks of Kelis' club-rock playground hit “Milkshake” or the car horn-like symphony that characterizes Mystikal's “Shake Ya Ass.” Instead, he shows you what he's working with, translated as flashing lights and stunning colors.

You still get the rock-doc basics, mind you: Williams' youth in the suburban neighborhood he calls “Atlantis,” buoyed by his parents' encouragement, big dreams and his love of music; Meeting future Neptunes co-founder Chad Hugo in band class; He did grunt work for Teddy Riley when the new jack swing bigwig improbably settled in Virginia Beach, and eventually wrote Riley's verse for Wreckx-N-Effect's “Rump Shaker”; the early rejections; the breakthrough comes; the Golden Age, when everything Williams and Hugo touched turned platinum; the ego trip before the fall; humility before the phoenix-like rebirth; the realization that family, friends, love, etc. are what really matter. It's the story of a child who dreams of making music on a large scale and revolutionizing several other worlds along the way, and whose dreams ultimately come true.

It's just that you achieve all of this through some landscapes that require assembling and little chunky figures that tell you that they were overwhelmed when they heard the trail of Neptune, and then boom! You will see the removable round head pop off and roll around before being replaced. Far be it from us to downplay the thrill of, say, seeing the “Rump Shaker” music video reworked entirely with LEGOs, or witnessing a LEGO Jay-Z testify that “there wasn't a drop of road in Pharrell.” Or when you one by one hear a Neptunes-produced tune or a collaborative solo from Pharrell, with every catchy hook and synth bloop and bleeep flowing into one another as a cosmic onslaught of color gives you a second-hand sugar rush. How many opportunities do you have to answer the question, “What would Kendrick Lamar look like as a LEGO guy?”, let alone have Williams tell you first-person about how he made history in the studio?

Sometimes all those little plastic avatars are an unnecessary distraction from what is in every way a compelling origin story. In other cases, the LEGO implementation of the whole thing offers a welcome distraction from a rather hackneyed business of music documentaries piece by piece Adding a formally unique touch to a very familiar, if somewhat incomplete, story arc. Occasionally they make a rare misstep. The time when Pharrell's Midas touch goes astray and he gets lost trying to produce pre-written songs is represented by a trio of creepy industrial types in gray suits who answer for every temptation that comes his way . It's such a vague, whimsical explanation for what happened during his post-superstardom creative trough that it does a disservice to his personal struggles, as well as the professional second wind that his Daft Punk collaboration gives us Despicable Me Soundtrack contribution and lots of dancing feet. Things sucked, but whatever the details. Check out these awesome LEGOs!

Such things can be in harmony piece by pieceThe general “accentuate the positive” vibe complements the sunny verve of much of Williams' music, allowing him to drop many self-adhesive platitudes as if they were hip. There's a lot of self-reflection behind these shiny, upbeat tunes, and occasionally you get some real insight through the Playtime mode. Otherwise, when it comes to looking back and looking forward, Williams says, “Take (everything) apart, brick by brick, and then put it back together.” In this case, he is extremely literal.