James Toback's "Tyson'

My friend, the light heavyweight boxer Chuck Mussachio, loaned me his bootleg copy of Tyson, and I watched this 90-minute film in the gritty Wildwood Boxing Club"“ a fitting screening room— while the amateur welterweight Anthony Hinsley worked out in the background.

Director James Toback and the former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson became close in the mid-'80s on the set of Toback's film, The Pickup Artist, talking about life late into the night, and Tyson is listed as a producer of Tyson, as is the Denver Nuggets pro basketball star Carmelo Anthony, the film's executive producer.

Trust is a recurrent theme in Tyson, and the former "baddest man on the planet" obviously trusted Toback to the point that he acquiesced in Toback's brilliant cinematic strategy of using Tyson himself as the sole interviewee and narrator of the film, which takes Tyson from his jack-rolling, stickup man, home invader, drug dealer youth in Brooklyn's desperate Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood through his rise to become the youngest heavyweight champ in history to his meteoric fall from boxing grace to spending three years in an Indiana prison on a rape conviction to his futile attempts to regain his fistic kingdom and, finally, to the sad, wistful, and peculiarly articulate 42-year-old man he is today.

Reciting Oscar Wilde

There has always been a sweet touch of the poet to the brazen, violent, perhaps bi-polar face Mike Tyson has presented to the world. At one point in Tyson, he recites from memory a long section of Oscar Wilde's poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, including the significant line: "Yet each man kills the thing he loves."

Toback literally got into Tyson's face in making this film. The camera stands inches away, the left side of his face now swirled with a Maori tattoo, a pencil mustache above the lips that have taken so many punches, as the boxer recounts a life that has been lived basically alone in the midst of untold riches (he went through between $300 and $400 million), countless hangers-on, entourages, women, four wives, advisers, lawyers, promoters, fans, and world renown rivaling that of his all-time idol, Muhammad Ali.

One man he trusted

His voice a little lower now than the high-pitched lisp that was so incongruous for a heavyweight champ, Tyson says early in the film that he trusted no one until, as an incarcerated 12-year-old, he met Constantine "Cus" D'Amato, the celebrated trainer, then in his 70s, who had taken Floyd Patterson and José Torres to world championships. "I started believing in this old man," Tyson recalls. "I trusted him. He broke me down and rebuilt me."

As Tyson speaks, we see archival footage of his early days, including D'Amato, who resembled the older Marlon Brando, lecturing him on boxing as well as life. D'Amato didn't live to see his protégé reach the heights of fistic glory, and over a scene of Tyson as a pallbearer at his mentor's funeral, Tyson says that after that loss, "I was naked to the world." Then his voice chokes with emotion and he falls silent. His sorrow is palpable even today.

Death of a daughter

Sorrow and loss haunt and follow Mike Tyson. Since Tyson won the Regard Knockout Award at the 2008 Cannes Film festival, its subject has suffered the accidental death this May of his four-year-old daughter, Exodus, one of his six children. The insight the film offers into this complicated and sensitive man, for all his looming and violent faults, renders this tragedy that much deeper and more poignant.

Tyson refers to the "promiscuous environment" of much of his life, and reveals that he was suffering from gonorrhea when he won the heavyweight title from Trevor Berbick. He dedicated that fight to D'Amato and says he wanted to "decimate" Berbick, who had defeated and humiliated Muhammad Ali, Tyson's shining idol. A stunning right hand fulfilled that wish. After the fight, Tyson says, he actually wore the heavyweight belt he won everywhere he went for three weeks. There is something boyishly charming in that admission.

When a woman says "'no'

Tyson isn't shy about his heralded sex life, recounting how "I love saying no all the time" to any sexual desire or request from a partner when he was in his prime as a fighter and lover. Evidently, Tyson couldn't take "no" for an answer himself, leading to his serving three years for the rape of the 18-year-old beauty pageant contestant Desiree Washington, whom he refers to in almost Elizabethan terms as "that wretched swine of a woman," maintaining his innocence to this day.

"I became a Muslim in prison, but lost my faith in God," he says. "Being in prison is the closest thing to death." Within a half-hour of his release from jail, a seemingly repentant Tyson and Muhammad Ali are shown entering a Muslim mosque to pray.

Out of control

Yet one of the next scenes shows Tyson totally out of control at a press conference for one of his comeback fights, grabbing his crotch and screaming at an opponent that he "will you make you my bitch" and other taunts until he is finally subdued and led away by his handlers. It is crimson, unreasoning anger, not the fake antipathy of so many staged boxing run-ins.

Tyson also relates how he "stomped" promoter Don King in front of the Beverly Hills Hilton over a dispute involving $20 million, which Tyson calls "a small amount of money." "Money is paper blood," he adds.

"'I was insane'

The nadir of Tyson's career was his knockout loss to James "Buster" Douglas in Tokyo, and after his release from prison his unsuccessful comeback attempts were epitomized in his infamous, futile biting of the ear of Evander Holyfield and subsequent disqualification. "I was insane at the moment," Tyson explains, and then tells how he "went home, smoked some weed, drank some liquor, and went to sleep."

He quit on his stool in his last fight against the very ordinary Kevin McBride. In an interview afterward, he told Jim Gray, "Boxing has no place in my heart any more."

And so Tyson ends.