After making the festival rounds for two years, the crowd-pleasing documentary “David Hockney: The Colors of Music” is just now opening at Film Forum, and it couldn’t be better timed. The wrathful god of movie distribution has lightened up for once, and has sent us the “The Colors of Music” to banish all clouds from the sky, warm the last chill from the air, and release an explosion of good vibes over Manhattan.

Bursting with joie de vivre and bonhomie, as exuberantly colorful as a Fauvist candy shop, this delightful studio visit hangs out with Mr. Hockney as he designs for the opera. Filmmakers Maryte Kavaliauskas and Seth Schneidman forgo any contextualizing master narrative and let the process speak for itself. Lazing from detail to detail, they peer over the artist’s shoulder as he dabs paint on Styrofoam mockups (“the nearest I get to making sculpture”), plays with lighting design, and goes for Wagner-scored drives in the Santa Monica mountains.

“No more Teutonic navel-gazing!” “No more ‘late Lufthansa’ design!” Following these peppy precepts, the artist allies his imagination to the masterworks of Stravinsky, Mozart, Strauss, Puccini, and Wagner. For his production of “The Rake’s Progress,” Mr. Hockney drew from Hogarth’s famous series of prints – literally. With a cheeky nod to the Ben-Day dots of Lichtenstein, he patterned the stage and costumes in exaggerated hatch marks. “Parade” is a riot of storybook whimsy; “The Magic Flute” a dazzling panoply of receding spaces; “Tristan and Isolde” a brash zigzag of orange and green.

I don’t know much about opera, but I know a good purple forest when I see one. Mr. Hockney has always struck me as a competent and innocuous but less than seminal pastiche artist: a line from Cocteau here, a form from Picasso there, a dab of Balthus, a bucket of Matisse. Unlike his masters, Mr. Hockney’s vision hasn’t changed mine in any appreciable way. If I had a beachfront bungalow in Malibu I’d happily hang a Hockney over the wet bar.

Mr. Hockney’s talent for staging is clear, however, though an inexplicable lack of live performance footage limits our ability to size up the final results. He finds visual lines in musical lines, coloring in the instrumentation. His command of stage space is vigorous and playful, with a special knack for modulating volumes through lighting and transparency. I haven’t seen one of Mr. Hockey’s operas firsthand, but on the evidence of “The Colors of Music,” I bet they’d change the way I look at a stage.

In person, Mr. Hockney seems a supreme charmer. All twinkling eyes and witty Paul Smith duds, he’s a mild-mannered bon vivant – the coolest gay uncle ever. His enthusiasm for his work, the music, and the good life is infectious, as is the joy of this most colorful of documentaries.

Until April 19 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).