"Tyson" has it all. A confessional film that showcases just how crazy, funny, spiritual, fun, pained, and fascinating the troubled boxer is as a man. He grew up in Brooklyn, the product of a rough neighborhood and constant bullying. He tried to escape the humiliation he felt by stealing, which landed him in jail where he picked up boxing as a hobby. When he got out he found his first real father figure in Constantine "Cus" D'Amato, an old trainer who taught him the spiritual side of boxing and the confidence that went along with it. He studied tape of guys like Rocky Marciano, Jack Dempsey, and Muhammad Ali, and during the 80's became a force to be reckoned with. Then "Cus" died and Mike lost his way, becoming very taken with his own indestructible image and like all great tragic stories, that always guarantees a fall. First his disastrous marriage to Robin Givens made him known as a cheater and a beater, and then he got cocky and lazy and lost a big fight to Buster Douglass. Then as the cherry on top, he was accused of rape and sentenced to 3 years in jail. His career would continue to go down hill from there.

This is Tyson's side of the story, so don't expect fair and balanced, but also don't expect him to pull any punches. He takes on some tough questions here and succeeds mightily in turning the tide in his favor. With that voice and that facial tattoo your instantly hooked, but what keeps you rooted to the screen is an insightful character study as well as a sad tale of how a guy with a "me against the world" mentality managed to take himself places he never dreamed of going, but also let his pit-bull-like emotions and out of control pride get the better of his reasoning. Director James Toback does a great job adding pictures and video clips for some flavor but this is Tyson's movie and his commentary just offers highlight after highlight after highlight.

His recollection of "Cus" D'Amato is surprisingly moving. His description of his mindset as a boxer is something next to God-like arrogance, and his views on women and sex expose more of that same type of domination. The commentary on the Holyfield fight, as well as the ear biting re-match, is fascinating to listen to. His description of prison is a haunting nightmare. He describes the people around him as leaches, especially Don King who he says would "Kill his own mother for a dollar." There are too many great moments in this movie to name but expect to be consistently riveted by the controversy, adversity, vulnerability, anger, and yes even his exaggerated sense of humor too. The "I want to eat his children" comment right before the Lennox Lewis fight is just one of many priceless things this man says.

Tyson's life has taken a sad turn. The fight has gone out of him. His last fight in 2005 was held strictly so he could get some money to pay the bills. Just you feel like your watching the real Tyson now. He is much more sobered and at peace, a man whose demeanor reflects someone whose been thru hell and been humbled by it. He admits his mistakes, makes you question some of his others, but above all just makes you feel for him anyway. "Tyson" succeeds in showcasing the boxer as someone much more vulnerable than the guy you see in the ring or shouting out "faggot" during a weigh-in. There is more dimension here than I expected and that makes this one of the years biggest surprises thus far.

Mike Tyson tells the story of his life from the mean streets of Brooklyn to his pigeons and his boxing life and his father figure trainer Cus D'Amato to his failed marriage and prison. It's great to hear him reflect on his life. He strikes me as a simple child-man who has gone through a lot and grown a lot. He seems honest and open. There isn't much that he won't talk about. It's a tour de force performance of a naturally charismatic man. One can see the man truly feel what he's saying. He may not be able to confront all of his demons yet. He is still a work in progress but this is a man on a journey and it's a fascinating one. Filmmaker James Toback dips his toe into documentary and it's a great start.

I wouldn't want to be Mike Tyson, not in a million years or for a million dollars, at any stage of his life. He grew up on the mean, poor streets of Brooklyn, stole and robbed in his young teen years, got sent to Juvenile Hall and then was trained by Cus D'Amato, famous and talented boxing trainer, and then became a boxing machine in the ring only to see his self-confidence and inner demons take over him as he saw everything crumble around him. At least, that's what James Toback's film on Tyson would want us to believe, or have us hear him out on anyway.

What's clever, and most absorbing, about Tyson is that it doesn't ask us to see all of the truth in the facts in this man's life, but that there may be some truth in this man's own self-analysis. We get no other voice in the film to contradict or say otherwise what Tyson himself says in looking back (we see old videos of what other people have said about him, be it boxing announcers to the infamous interview Robin Givens gave to Barbara Walters with Tyson sitting next to her). He's not exactly a very "good" man even by his own estimation, but if there's one thing that he'd want to get out in the open, by his own admission, he's trying, Lord how he's trying.

The interviews, done as Mike Tyson was getting himself cleaned up of drugs and alcohol, are shot in the face-to-camera approach of Errol Morris, but there's another influence I wonder if Toback was tooling with which is Robert Altman. This may be the only documentary I can think of where the one and only interviewee's dialog and words overlap each other in most cases. This is very effective, such as when Tyson is talking about his time in prison for rape and we hear and see his various memories of the experience overlapping one another. This, plus a strongly edited split-screen effect, creates a kind of prism-vision of Mike Tyson in this very focused portrayal of the man, myth, legend himself.

It's self-confession and a history lesson. For someone who hasn't followed all of Tyson's career and personal life the former is put into good light. I learned almost all I needed to know about Tyson as a boxer from this film. As a human being that may be another matter. He is honest about himself, as if in a therapy session, but to what degree (even to his friend of 20 years, the director) is hard to say. But this only adds to the interest; how much his trainer's death in the mid 80s really had on him as a boxer is really hard to say, since he contradicts himself as saying he was never the same after his death, losing his already fragile self-confidence, while also becoming one of the dominant presences in boxing in the 20th century in the late 80s and early 90s.

What one gets from this film is something rare in documentary, which is no-BS bias. We get no other point of view but this subjective portrait, which is sometimes harsh on himself and sometimes, arguably, not harsh enough. For those who only know of the crazy-ass Tyson (i.e. "I'm gonna f*** you till you love me" quotes) one can see him open up on his own past of being so afraid and with such a lack of self-esteem that this profession he chose was the only logical way to go aside from death or in prison for longer than that of his rape conviction (which, true to subjective portrait, he still denies to this day).

It's not perfect as a documentary, and there are a couple of points I groaned inside from Toback's artistic choice, most notably the shots of Tyson walking on a beach at sunset with some poetry narration (that's right, Tyson breaking out the stanzas) that feel so against the hardcore personal nature of the rest of the picture. It's like we're all collective psychiatric interpreters of this incredibly flawed once-truly-great fighter, and at the least there's nothing else like it in boxing film history or just in theaters now in general. 9.5/10