Morgan Neville’s new documentary Piece by Piece, which charts the rise of hip-hop star Pharrell Williams is in many ways a very conventional portrait documentary. It is built primarily around Pharrell’s own narrative of his life, as he sits down with Neville and recounts his childhood in Virginia Beach and how he rose to immense prominence in the music world first by writing and producing music for others before becoming a recording artist himself. There are requisite interviews with all the various luminaries with whom he has worked over the years, including Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani, Timbaland, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, and Busta Rhymes. There are up’s and down’s in his narrative, times when he was soaring and times when he was struggling (although it is notable that, unlike so many music celebs, there are no major crashes—no drug addiction, no drunk-driving incidents, no arrests).

However, what is not at all conventional about Piece by Piece is that the entire film is done with Lego animation. That’s right: We never actually see Pharrell or Jay-Z or Gwen Stefani or Morgan Neville or Chad Hugo on screen, but rather their Lego avatars, even during standard-issue talking-head interviews (of which there are many). It is a disarming technique and one that has every reason not to work, but somehow does largely because it fits thematically with Pharrell’s artistic philosophy. Early in the film he asks Neville, “What if nothing is new? What if life is like a Lego set? And you can put ’em together whatever way you want, but you’re borrowing from colors that already existed. Does that make sense?”

Of course it makes perfect sense, especially in a musical realm in which borrowing and appropriating and reworking are fundamental elements of the art, which is why seeing the soft-spoken Pharrell’s life played out with moving Lego parts fits. As he says, he always saw himself as different, so why would a documentary portrait of his life look like others? It also gives the film a bold way of envisioning Pharrell’s artistry, especially when he talks about seeing music as colors. Because the majority of Pharrell’s story is uplifting—such a rare feat these days—the bright, Technicolors of the Lego world gel with his narrative, so that when things get a little dark in the end and attention turns to elements of social justice and the Black Lives Matter movement, you feel the change.

Neville won an Oscar for Best Documentary for 20 Feet From Stardom (2013), which was released the same year that Pharrell arguably hit his peak with his Grammy-winning collaboration with Daft Punk on “Lucky” and work with Robin Thicke on “Blurred Lines.” Neville’s other documentaries have covered such beloved figures as Johnny Cash, Fred Rogers, and Steve Martin, so he is no stranger to this terrain. He certainly leans into what has worked before, hence the overall conventional nature of the film, although the decision to go with Lego animation constantly forces us to rethink the way we experience those conventions (it also opens room for some humor, such as the scene when Pharrell meets Snoop Dog for the first time in a haze of marijuana smoke that is explained away with Lego men spraying canisters of “PG Spray”). That PG rating certainly suggests that some rough edges have been smoothed down and not everything that could be told is, but the reality is that no documentary is ever truly complete. Pharrell clearly wants his story to be one that inspires, and in that regard Piece by Piece is a definite success.

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