Mr. Cain first attended the Starck Club in 1985 when his then-girlfriend’s brother, who had heard about the place from his hairdresser in Arkansas, was visiting Dallas and insisted they check it out.

“There wasn’t any of the social media ways of getting the message out, but what they had was this hairdressers’ network,” Mr. Cain said. “The hairdressers in Dallas and the surrounding states would tell everyone who sat down on their chair about the club.”

He first tried to tell the story of the Starck Club in a fictional film, which he wrote in the mid-1990s. At the Sundance Film Festival in the 1997, he learned that Mr. Hampton was shopping a script based on the Starck. Neither project came to fruition, but Mr. Cain remained fascinated with the subject. After his documentary “TV Junkie” premiered at Sundance in 2006, he returned to the idea of a documentary about the club, with Mr. Hampton as a producer and music supervisor, and Mr. Hargrove, a cinematographer and editor, as co-director.

Part of the challenge of making “The Starck Club,” the filmmakers said, was persuading the club’s principals to revisit the era. Many, including the founder Blake Woodall, have gone on to more traditional careers. (Mr. Woodall works for his family’s Richardson, Tex.-based company, which makes oven range hoods.) It took nearly two years of interviewing former club denizens before someone was able to put the filmmakers in touch with the club’s Paris-based designer and namesake, Philippe Starck.

“He started reliving his frustrations from that time,” Mr. Hargrove said. Mr. Starck, as evident in the film, felt his vision was compromised by the club’s investors, who insisted that he scale back costs.

“The Starck Club” is likely to please those who lived through the era — and prove eye-opening for those who did not. Mr. Cain and Mr. Hargrove make a strong case that Dallas had more cultural influence than is usually acknowledged, especially when it came to the new wave music that was played at the club. (The film features interviews with D. J.s like Paul Oakenfold and Tommie Sunshine and bands like Book of Love.) They also correct the widespread misperception that the club folded shortly after a major drug bust in 1986; in fact, it remained popular for three more years before Mr. Woodall and his partners decided to close it. (Since 2010, a nightclub called Zouk has operated in the space.)