A Bigger Splash

This intimate and innovative documentary about English-born, California-based artist David Hockney and his work honors its subject through creative risk-taking. Director Jack Hazan creates an improvisatory narrative-nonfiction hybrid featuring Hockney, a wary participant, as well as his circle of friends, capturing the agonized end of the lingering affair between Hockney and his muse, Peter Schlesinger. The result is at once a time capsule of hedonistic gay life in the 1970s, a tender depiction of gay romance that dispenses with the then-current narratives of self-hatred and self-pity, and a record of artistic creation that is itself a work of art.