“The trouble with science-fiction writers,” a film studies teacher in my distant past once said while pointing to a genre paperback on my desk, “is that those guys only read each other.” The volume that provoked this comment couldn’t have been poorer evidence for my teacher’s case. The book, “Alone Against Tomorrow,” was a survey of Harlan Ellison’s short works of “speculative fiction” going back some 10 years prior to its 1971 copyright. In it I discovered not the lifeless fantasies of a literary myopic, but an embarrassment of prose and conceptual riches crafted by a cultural and experiential sponge of wide-ranging and apparently unquenchable thirst. Even though I was reading them more than a half decade after they were published, the stories in “Alone Against Tomorrow” hummed with a vision, compassion, and insight that felt utterly of the moment.

Subsequent exposure to Mr. Ellison’s prose, dramatic writing, and marvelous criticism of television and film (dubbing the dreadful first entry in the “Star Trek” big-screen franchise “Spockalypse Now!” remains an all-time great critical turn of phrase) helped me to romance the mysterious physics of story, and made me aware of the responsibility that comes with forming opinions, identifying beliefs, experiencing feelings, and communicating them articulately, sensitively, and passionately on a page.

“Tragically, in this era of dumbed-down culture, Harlan is not as known as he should be,” said Erik Nelson, director of “Dreams With Sharp Teeth,” a nonfiction film portrait that puts Mr. Ellison’s life and work front and center. “If this film sparks a major revival of his books and kicks him in the ass to write new ones, I’ll have done my job.”

Messrs. Ellison and Larson will appear with “Dreams With Sharp Teeth” when the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater hosts a preview screening of the film Tuesday in advance of an official release at Film Forum on June 6.

Perhaps more than any other American writer of the 20th century, Mr. Ellison has doggedly insisted that genre storytelling in any medium be subject to the same intensity of critical thinking by which all art is evaluated. This has not endeared Mr. Ellison to many of those in the often intellectually lax arenas of film and television production, science-fiction fandom, and the Internet, an invention that the author shuns completely.

In interviews and public appearances, Mr. Ellison’s unwavering requirement that he be granted the same clarity of thought and conciseness in the questions he receives as in the answers he delivers has made him something of a bête noir, even among his own audience. Appropriately, “Dreams With Sharp Teeth” contains scenes of Mr. Ellison holding the floor at book readings and lectures with a directness that evokes the original advertising campaign for Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry.” “You don’t assign Harlan Ellison to a topic,” to paraphrase that film’s one-sheet, “you just turn him loose.”

But while “Dreams With Sharp Teeth” portrays Mr. Ellison’s notorious vehemence with unflinching clarity (“Harlan doesn’t have an off switch; he doesn’t have a censor button,” the screenwriter Josh Olson observes at one point), the film is by no means the literary biographical equivalent of a reel of hockey highlights made up of nothing but fights.

“It’s not crazy Harlan, the old man that’s yelling at those kids to get off his front lawn,” Mr. Nelson said. “Harlan is not an old man. Harlan is a brilliantly insightful observer of the human condition and no more a crazy old man now than he was when he was 7 years old. Conversely, Harlan hasn’t matured much since he was 7 years old, as he’d be the first to admit.”

“Dreams With Sharp Teeth” owes much of its considerable lucidity to the gradualness of its genesis. “The filming began, though I didn’t know it at the time, in March of 1981,” Mr. Nelson said. “With great trepidation and nervousness, I called up Harlan and asked if I can interview him for a film.”

“Erik somehow got into my domain, my purview, my line of sight, and seemed a nice enough chap,” Mr. Ellison, a 73-year-old Cleveland native, said recently over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “He was always polite and not sycophantic because he quickly understood that I can’t much stand that.”

The footage from 1981 became the slow-boiling catalyst for a full-length documentary project undertaken in 2002.

“I’d call Harlan and stalk him and come over and tape these interviews,” Mr. Nelson said. “At the time, I was clear with him about what I was doing this for, but Harlan I think didn’t, or didn’t want to, take that in.”

A staunch advocate of the belief that a writer’s duty is to his work, Mr. Ellison says he took little notice of the project. “It just didn’t register with me that he was doing anything other than some fan-boy project,” the author said.

As the material took shape, Mr. Nelson, a documentary producer of considerable repute, with Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” to his credit, outed himself more completely. “I said, ‘Look, I’m not a crazed fan guy; I really am a serious filmmaker,'” Mr. Nelson recalled. “‘If you work with me, I’m going to make this movie.'”

Among the footage Mr. Ellison had stockpiled was an 8 mm home movie depicting a family vacation to Niagara Falls shortly before Mr. Ellison’s father passed away. During production, “Erik showed me this footage,” Mr. Ellison recalled. “I must have been 70 or 71 when he did. It was the first time I’d seen my father alive and walking since the day he died and I f—–g fell apart! What I didn’t know was that Erik was filming it.”

At a rough-cut screening, history repeated itself. “You know those comic book covers where Batman and Robin are reading a comic with Batman and Robin on the cover reading a comic with Batman and Robin on the cover reading a comic with Batman and Robin on the cover?” Mr. Ellison said. “Here I am sitting in this little room watching me watching the film of me with my father and I started to cry all over again. Now comes the epiphany — holy f—, this guy really made a movie about me! What do I do now?”

“Dreams With Sharp Teeth” makes its premiere on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway and West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).