Mike Tyson isn't a difficult guy to figure out–or, at least, he doesn't think he is anymore. Given the opportunity to wax nostalgic for the entirety of James Toback's documentary Tyson, the former champ indulges in a series of anecdotes taking us through his training under Cus D'Amato, his rape conviction, and the infamous "Bite Fight," concluding that it could all be traced back to his bullied childhood. From there, it becomes easier to understand that everything in his life–from his demeanour in the ring to his hunger for sexual conquest–was dictated by a desire to push himself to the edge, something he did for the better part of twenty-five years until inevitably losing the eye of the tiger. ("Old too soon, smart too late," Tyson states in a chillingly matter-of-fact manner.) But for all his exorcised demons, he carries with him a great deal of bitterness and obliviousness. Regarding the "ten or twenty million" he won in a hundred-million dollar lawsuit against Don King as "some small amount," Tyson clearly maintains the perhaps-unavoidable, unshakeable detachment from reality attendant to living a superstar's lifestyle. As obvious as Tyson may seem, there's a fascinating conundrum to be found in its subject's recitation of the most famous lines from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," which invites questions as to how and when he was hit by the epiphanies repeated herein–and what, precisely, he's still missing to complete that sense of self-awareness.

Because this man fits so comfortably within Toback's autobiographical pantheon of poetic brutes leading double lives, one gets the distinct feeling that the filmmaker has attempted to fill in any thematic gaps with expressions of his own auteurism. Backed by a cacophony of conflicting, overlapping voices (Tyson's own), the shifting-split-screen aesthetic occasionally draws insight into how the boxer's whirlwind existence has affected his mind, yet as a drum beaten relentlessly, it more often suggests a conscious link back to Black and White (Toback's first narrative film to feature Tyson) than a visual representation Tyson's duplicitous or schizophrenic tendencies. As such, Tyson's number one problem is that it fancies itself as not so much a genuine portrait of its subject as a general dissertation on the follies of life. Make no mistake that the hour-and-a-half we spend with this man is an engaging one–particularly considering that the most stinging indictments of character come from Tyson himself, whether he realizes it or not. Ultimately, Tyson is just a little too comfortable with leaving us the simple platitude that choices are made and every decision has a consequence.–IP