Antonio Lopez in the 1970s (Film Movement)

“You couldn’t meet him and not fall in love with him.” “He was a magician.” “He was gorgeous.” “Anyone who came close to him was transformed.” “I had a wild crush on Antonio. Didn’t everybody?” Fashion and movie stars revel in memories of illustrator and scene-maker Antonio Lopez in an adoring but carpaccio-thin documentary. Over-the-top as it is in its praise, Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco reflects a powerful nostalgia for fashion’s carefree past more vividly than it zeroes in on its dashing hero.

Vogue creative director Grace Coddington credits Lopez with liberating and revolutionizing fashion illustration in the early 1970s. Along the way, Lopez cut a fierce, magnetic profile on the New York club scene that drew muses such as Grace Jones and Jerry Hall (to whom the mostly gay Lopez was briefly engaged). Filmmaker James Crump has assembled heavy hitters like former models Jessica Lange and Pat Cleveland, Interview publisher Bob Colacello, fashion doyenne Joan Juliet Buck, and the late photographer Bill Cunningham to extol the Puerto Rican–born artist’s brilliance. Although all are well-spoken and affectionate, the coterie’s helium gas of worship around Lopez soon reaches dangerously high levels. “David Hockney and Andy Warhol both really admired Antonio’s drawings and were even a bit jealous. As an artist you never dared to draw the figure because Antonio drew it so well,” declares artist Paul Caranicas. Really?

Where the film hits home is by evoking a bygone fashion free-for-all. Warhol superstars, art stars, and hedonists cavorted in the sexual revolution before the descent of AIDS. Footage captures wild be-ins at Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, teeming with thousands of exultant freaks on parade. Producers have splashed out on music from Isaac Hayes, Donna Summer, and Chic for a soundtrack in tune with the soulful but sophisticated vibe of the period. Fashion from the period looks touchingly improvised and naughty. “We had a certain kind of decadence,” remembers one veteran model off-camera, “but it was a light, fun decadence.”

Cunningham weeps in remembrance of Lopez’s death from AIDS in 1982, but the film devotes remarkably little attention to the illustrator’s last days. What remains is a memory of an unrepeatable moment in time. In the words of Lange, “There was a wildness to it, a sense that we could do whatever we wanted.” That sense of freedom endures longer than Antonio Lopez’s gushing accolades.