Quotes of the Day

A documentary, like any movie trying to hold your attention, needs either a big theme — some tremendous political injustice will do — or a magnetic character that keeps people watching. Tyson has character to spare, since its subject and star is the two-time heavyweight champion and three-year guest of the Indiana penal system. In boxing, "the sweet science," he was the Frankenstein monster.

Yet Mike Tyson, now 42, would be worthy of documentary attention even if he hadn't been convicted of rape or snacked on Evander Holyfield's ear. Behind the elaborate facial tattoos and that odd soft lisp, parodied on The Simpsons and Don Imus's old radio show, is a compelling mind-voice, at once naive and reflective. The man may be washed up, bankrupt, a figure of fear or fun to those who remember him. But in close-up here, detailing his "madness of the mind, chaos of the brain," Mike Tyson is a star. (See Top 10 Mike Tyson Moments.)

And in James Toback, he found the ideal listener for what it essentially a 90-minute monologue punctuated by film clips, with Tyson narrating his entire life, including the blow-by-blow commentary of his fight footage. Since his first film as screenwriter, The Gambler in 1974, and Fingers, his 1978 debut as writer-director, Toback has put churning, charismatic self-destructive characters on the screen. (He got an Oscar nomination for the life story of another scoundrel, Bugsy Siegel, in the 1991 Bugsy.) Toback has always been fascinated by the machismo of professional athletes; he wrote a tell-all memoir of his years spent with football-star-turned-actor Jim Brown. In Tyson he had a man who took Brown's use of violence to extravagant, uncontrollable depths. It's as if Tyson did everything wrong and interesting in his life to make himself the perfect Toback topic.

Tyson's attraction to any biographer is that he carries epic achievements and contradictions within him. At first he was a variation on the proverbial 97-pound weakling: an overweight street kid from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He got beaten up regularly by the local toughs — "Very few of them," he says, "are functioning adults right now" — who lured him into street crime. As a 12-year-old in a detention home he was discovered by Cus d'Amato, who had trained and managed Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight boxing title in the '50s. Cus saw potential in this soft-spoken junior thug, and Mike went along with the program because "I was afraid of being physically humiliated in the streets again."

In d'Amato, Tyson found the father he never had. "He broke me down and rebuilt me," Tyson says of his coach, who adopted him, raised him with the d'Amato family in the Catskills and gave the boy focus and purpose as a boxer. Tyson was an apt pupil: he obsessively studied old films of boxing legends, learned the spiritual side of the warrior mentality and, he says, "restrained myself from having sex for about five years." He tore through the amateur ranks, knocking out one opponent in a record eight seconds, and was heavyweight champ before he was 21. (His mentor died just before the big fight.) Those victories helped him realize that "I don't have to worry about anyone bullying me again."

As a fight phenom, what Tyson lacked in height and reach he more than made up for with an implacable mix of speed and strength. "Once in the ring," he says, "I'm God." Or a more satanic force, giving the evil eye to his adversary before a bout, then devastating him with "One, two, three punches. I'm throwin' punches in bunches." A long line of opponents surrendered to his lasered rage; they toppled like Wooden-Soldier Rockettes in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. More than Joe Lewis or Marciano or Ali, "Iron Mike" Tyson seemed set for an uninterrupted 15-year reign.

Top of the World, Bottom of the Ocean

But how to stay hungry when you're dining on caviar, sycophancy and willing women? Everyone wanted to spend time with the champ. ("I met the President of Istanbul," he marvels.) Raised by a prostitute mother, deprived of his father figure when d'Amato died before he won the title, Tyson dreamed of creating his own family, but his marriage to actress Robin Givens — and her relating of his supposed brutalities in a joint interview with Barbara Walters — was his first sensational humiliation. The teenage celibate needed to dominate women by the dozens, the hundreds, though he says that what he really wanted in a woman was "loyalty, companionship, friendship, ferociousness." He sees himself as a selfless sexual partner: "I don't like being loved; I like loving. I have too much love to give; I don't want to accept it." That sounds more like the need to control, dominate, to set the terms for sexual combat, to be a bully in bed.

He's not so chivalrous toward the young woman whose testimony in a rape trial sent him to jail for three years: "that wretched swine of a woman, Desiree Washington." Nor does he have fond memories of manager Don King, whom he accused of stealing millions from him, and he beat up and stomped down at the Beverly Hills Hotel: "a wretched, slimy, reptilian motherf----r." Nor of the entourage a kid from the streets attracts when he becomes a rich dude with no sense of fiscal moderation: "They suck my blood and suck my blood, then sell it back to me and suck it again."

Describing the fellow inmates he sounds like a sympathetic shrink — "These people are borderline sociopaths. They deserve to be in hospitals more than prisons" — rather than a member of the fraternity. After prison he returned to the ring with facial tattoos of a Maori warrior, and images of Mao and Che on his body. But those were only emblems of the focused ferocity that used to be inside him, of the burning concentration that made him a champ.

Tyson lost his last chance at a championship when, in a rematch with Holyfield, he took a rapacious bite out of his opponent's ear. A couple years later, he ended his boxing career in the most humiliating way: not on his feet, or on his back, but on a stool, refusing to come out and fight for the seventh round against a nobody named Kevin McBride. He talks about his last year in the ring as if it were the only job he knew: "I'm just fighting to take care of the bills."

These days, professing paternal joy in his six kids, Tyson says, "I have to live on the top of the world or the bottom of the ocean, but I don't know how to live in the middle of life." Now twice the age he was when he became champ, Tyson sings the sad, familiar refrain: "old too soon, smart too late." Not too late, though, to offer a hard-won perspective on a hard-fought life, in a suavely assembled movie that could be declared the undisputed champ of sports documentaries, heavyweight class.

Read TIME's 1988 cover story on boxing and Tyson

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

• Richard Corliss
• Mike Tyson made a lot of false moves -- which makes him the perfect documentary subject for filmmaker James Toback