Like: “Where the hell was Joni Mitchell?” She’s in this one — there are two shots of her within the first minute of the credit sequence, to immediately reassure us there will be ladies of, and in, the canyon this time around.

It was like seeing a promising pilot for a series that never got green-lit, leaving out not just Mitchell but Jackson Browne, the Eagles and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as Joni-come-latelies.

That affords us milestones like the arrivals of Browne and Mitchell in the woodsy ‘hood as baby-faced wizard-cherubs, the Mitchell/Graham Nash live-in romance that produced the song “Our House,” country music supplanting folk as the dominant extra ingredient in the rock stew.

Ellwood, the director of “History of the Eagles,” a movie that was weirdly liked by Eagles fans, detractors and even the actual Eagles (and who also helmed Showtime’s terrific upcoming Go-Go’s documentary), does her best to occasionally darken the door of this bungalow heaven.

“Laurel Canyon” is a nearly four-hour exercise in bliss, throwing us back to a fleeting time when musical warmth and formal excellence went hand in hand and made the whole world want to go “California Dreamin’.” With apologies to Joni Mitchell, this, not Woodstock, is the garden you’ll be left wanting to get back to.

At times, it feels like the whole scene was a precursor to Fleetwood Mac’s eventual romantic complications, writ even larger when it came to the Mamas and the Papas’ cross-entanglements, or half of CSNY being more in love with Mitchell than she was with them.

It’s a little frustrating, at first, to gradually figure out that we’re never going to see the 21st century faces of, among others, Browne, Crosby, Stills, Chris Hillman, Richie Furay, Robbie Krieger, Michelle Phillips or Love’s Johnny Echols.

Ellwood does use a fair amount of audio from deceased subjects like Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Cass Ellliot, Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean, so putting everyone in voiceover, instead of just the dead, puts everyone back on the same mortal coil, for cinematic purposes.

(Young is one of the few living mainstays of the scene who apparently did not sit for an interview with Ellwood. That’s not surprising for mercurial Neil: His participation in the previous “Echo of the Canyon” amounted to allowing himself to be shot playing guitar in the studio through a glass partition for the end credits.) The only newly shot footage consists mostly of drone shots of the canyon, or quick footage of sports cars racing through the curvy streets that could almost be second-unit stuff from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”.

Yet she does succeed in establishing it as a physical locale in which all the “arteries and capillaries” that lead off of the canyon’s one main thoroughfare metaphorically stand in for musical stems and branches — except the music never took us into a dead end?

But maybe nothing speaks more to Laurel Canyon’s status as an idyll than the series of photos Diltz took when he first met Joni Mitchell, when she stood leaning and chatting outside her window before he ever entered the house.

David Crosby — who the movie spends almost no time painting as a jerk, maybe since that was already covered so well in “Echo” and his own documentary — is the one who gets to make the final sales pitch: “There are periods in history when there are peaks and nobody really knows why