Brick by brick: Movie shows how Lego rebuilt

My earliest memory of Lego is being relegated to play with the leftover bits my older brother had deemed unnecessary for his latest space battle re-creation. Four years younger than he, I often stuck to laying brick after brick of simple, cube-like buildings as I watched his sets become more and more elaborate.

Lego, it seems, is part of the fabric of childhood. Most everyone is familiar with it in some way, but few know the backstory — how Lego came about, how the company nearly folded, or how its passionate fans were ultimately the ones who helped it recreate itself. “A Lego Brickumentary,” the new film from directors Daniel Junge and Kief Davidson, tells that story and brings its viewers into the remarkable world of Lego subculture.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lego began producing specialized theme sets en masse. Harry Potter, “Lord of the Rings,” “Star Trek” — they ranged from one geek obsession to the next, but they were all meant to be relatively easy to put together. The company focused less on its core product, the classic Lego brick, and suffered because of it.

As one of the executives explains in the film, the new play sets had no natural demographic. Those who wanted a Harry Potter scene re-creation would buy a re-creation that didn’t require the building effort. Those who wanted to build wanted a set that required extensive building. The company’s new products offered neither.

The movie is, in many ways, a profile of a company’s comeback. What allowed Lego to rebound was that it started listening to its fans. When they started hacking into Lego’s Mindstorm robots and rewriting the computer code for fun, the company had a eureka moment.

“We need to be aware that 99.9 percent of the smartest people in the world don’t work for us,” says Tormod Askildsen, senior director for community development at Lego. And “when a company starts to deal with users,” part of that 99.9 percent, “it grows.”

The best parts of the movie, though, aren’t even about the company, but the users themselves and the enclave of Lego culture they have built.

There’s Alice Finch, the mother who has built a massive model of Rivendell, the fictional Elven city in “The Lord of the Rings,” for BrickCon in 2013, hoping for a third consecutive People’s Choice Award. There’s Stephen Pakbaz, one of the NASA engineers behind the Mars Curiosity rover, who built a Lego replica that is now sold as a Lego set. And there’s Dan LeGoff, a psychiatrist whose Lego-based therapy has helped autistic children communicate with each other.

The documentary entwines multiple stories, revisiting them at moments of upset and climax. It relies too much on its mini figure Jason Bateman narrator — whose cringeworthy humor diminishes the film. And it randomly brings in “Lego House” singer Ed Sheeran, NBA player Dwight Howard and “South Park” co-creator Trey Parker, simply because they all like Lego.

But the film tells a remarkable story about a company that almost went under and recovered only with the insight of its fans. Lego, the film shows, is much more than a toy. It is an entire culture, with a remarkable story behind it.

Opens today at the Hollywood Theater, Dormont.