Director Laurent Bouzereau (‘Five Came Back’) serves up an affectionate portrait of the man behind the much-loved scores for ‘Jaws,’ ‘Star Wars’ and many, many more.

One of the most reliable pieces of Disney+‘s still-evolving brand has been adulatory celebrity-driven commercials masquerading as “documentaries” while offering cheery and worshipful portraits of figures like Jim Henson, Mickey Mouse and the collective Imagineering profession.

There’s little doubt that evoking the name “John Williams” produces a Pavlovian response more instantly visceral than the response to “Steven Spielberg” or “Tom Hanks.” And more varied as well! Bouzereau is able to take advantage of that psychological burrowing, knowing that any room of a dozen viewers could make a dozen different instant associations with any mention of Williams’ name — from thoughts of Superman or E.T. taking flight to the subaquatic rumble of a shark’s approach to the orchestral Yahrzeit candle of Itzhak Perlman’s plaintive violin solos to the wonder induced by a first encounter with a resurrected dinosaur or an alien spacecraft.

Bouzereau, whose introspective Hollywood on Hollywood documentaries have included substantive films like the Emmy-winning Five Came Back and glorified promos like Disney+’s Timeless Heroes: Indiana Jones & Harrison Ford, is able to leverage his exhaustive resumé for impeccable access here. Would Steven Spielberg be this utterly comfortable hanging out with a director who hadn’t made an uncountable number of behind-the-scenes features with him over the years? Impossible to know for sure, but the best parts here show Williams and Spielberg literally just standing around chatting about their collaborations.

Those sequences, as well as footage from an apparently exhaustive filmed retrospective panel with Spielberg and Williams, make a persuasive argument that this could have been an even simpler movie than Bouzereau’s already straightforward approach has made of it. Put Spielberg and Williams or Lucas and Williams in a room together, give them a snippet of music to discuss, take two steps back and let the magic flow. To Bouzereau’s credit, that’s a lot of what he does.

In addition to Spielberg and Lucas, Bouzereau has assembled an intimidating roster of Williams’ filmmaking collaborators, including J.J. Abrams, Chris Columbus, Ron Howard, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, whose relationship with the maestro goes back to his own childhood. The lineup of fellow composers and musicians is at least equally impressive, from colleagues like Alan Silvestri and Thomas Newman to some of the most recognizable classical performers — Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Anna-Sophie Mutter — and even Chris Martin of Coldplay and Branford Marsalis, whose giddy appreciation for the jazz bona fides of the Star Wars cantina band is contagious.

The memory-driven reflections on Williams’ first collaborations with Spielberg, which brought him to work with Lucas, and the magical year in which Williams composed scores for Star Wars, Close Encounters and Black Sunday are methodical. But owing to the warmth of the storytelling and, of course, countless musical snippets, they never feel dry.

Sometimes, the documentary even feels rigorous. Thanks to his ample access to Spielberg’s home movies, Bouzereau is able to give us behind-the-scenes treats like footage from various scoring sessions, as well as a few precious outtakes like music-free clips from Jaws and unused pieces from Star Wars. But I wish there were more moments like the one where Williams blends musical theory and rhetoric to explain why the five-note central theme of Close Encounters is more effective than the pages of additional five-note combinations he experimented with.

There could stand to be more actual discussion of process from Williams, and more effort from the assembled musicians to nerd out about what makes Williams special. Instead, we get David Newman giving a rudimentary definition of “leitmotif” and seeming almost embarrassed at how fancy he’s getting. But there’s only so much that can be covered in a feature-length documentary.