Tyson, director James Toback's feature-length sit-down with the disgraced former boxing champ, is fascinating in a narrow, claustrophobic way: with no new interview footage from anyone but Tyson himself (and only a few minutes of testimony from other--mainly Toback's boxing mentor and father figure Cus D'Amato--in the archival material that's included)--it seals the viewer inside the echo chamber of Tyson's head, and it's confusing and scary in there. The movie carries a charge, but that's partly because Tyson and Toback have similar attitudes and obsessions, especially regarding machismo, women and sex, and the supposed nobility of outlaw behavior, that they'd both have been better off dropping as soon as they hit puberty. (It's skin-crawling to listen to the convicted rapist Tyson babbling about how he once thought a "great man" was obliged to "conquer" a vast number of beautiful and powerful women, and how, rather than get over that, he came to realize that these succubi only suck the strength from the men in their grasp--especially since it's easy to picture Toback, sitting off-camera. nodding his hairy melon head.) Powerful as Toback's movie is as psychodrama, it's not the place to go to get a clear, thoughtful picture of Tyson's life and career. For that, viewers would be best off tracking down Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, a documentary made by Barbara Kopple (whose other credits range from the classic 1976 Harlan County, USA and its 1990 follow-up American Dream to the more recent Dixie Chicks doc Shut Up & Sing) for NBC TV in 1993. The film, which first aired while Tyson was serving his prison sentence, won Kopple the Directors' Guild Award for "Best Directorial Achievement in Documentary" of the year. It was released on videocassette but hasn't made it to DVD.

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“Iron Mike” turns out to be a sympathetically pitiful figure in James Toback’s Tyson, a documentary told exclusively through archival clips and interviews with the former heavyweight champ, all of which are fractured by the director’s splitting of the screen into visual quadrants and his deft editing of Tyson monologues into a lucid first-person narrative. Such aesthetic division seems fitting given the fragmented subject at hand, who exhibits less of the raging-bull persona of his heyday than the severely screwed-up individual that the public came to know during, and after, his precipitous personal and professional fall from grace. At times contrite, angry, amusing and scary, and always more self-analytical than one would expect, Tyson comes across as an athlete destined for greatness and a man fated to fail, an impression that Toback (who previously worked with the boxer in 1999’s Black and White) readily promotes through subtle editorializing that amplifies the idea that the fighter is something of a tragic figure. It’s a hypothesis that has some validity, as evidenced by the doc’s thoughtful recounting of his early years living with a destitute family and running scams in Brooklyn. Too bad, then, that Tyson avoids taking the steps necessary to conclusively argue its case.

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