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Tyson

• Directed by James Toback
• With Mike Tyson
• Classification: 14A

In Tyson, James Toback and his camera go toe-to-toe with disgraced former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson, making the feared boxer bare his soul.

Now, you may well think that Mike Tyson is not someone whose soul you particularly want to see bared. Notorious for violent outbursts, a rape conviction, biting off part of opponent Evander Holyfield's ear and his association with Don King, the former heavyweight champion came to represent pretty much everything despicable about the sport of boxing. Over the years, his alarming public comments– from wanting to punch opponents' noses into their brains to eating their children – have not suggested he was someone with whom you'd want to spend an entire movie.

Toback, to his considerable credit, turns that view around by showing Tyson as a complicated person who has more thoughtful things to say. Now past 40, the former, self-styled “baddest man on the planet” is shaved bald, with spidery tattoos on his face that make him look like some Romulan villain from Star Trek who insists he comes in peace: “I just want to be a decent human being,” Tyson says.

That plea comes near the end of this 88-minute swarm of words, which Toback has recorded, sometimes in overlapping voice tracks, with split images of his subject. Typically, Tyson's a mess of contradictions. He sounds genuinely shocked when reporting that some of his fellow prisoners were “borderline sociopaths.” At the same time, his descriptions of the pleasure of hurting fighters in the ring or “dominating” women in bed sound unnervingly sociopathic themselves. As for the 18-year-old beauty-pageant contestant he was convicted of raping, she's just “a wretched swine.”

Filmmaker Toback, a 64-year-old former literature professor with a long-time fascination with sex and race, befriended Tyson when the boxer was 19. He later used him in an improvised scene in a 1999 film, Black and White , in which he encouraged Robert Downey Jr., playing a gay producer, to come on to the unwitting boxer (Tyson slapped Downey to the floor). It was an unpleasant stunt and there's also something a little creepy here about how the director works Tyson (who was in drug rehab during part of the shooting), using techniques Toback said he learned in his own psychoanalysis.

Perhaps the most surprising theme in Tyson's monologue is fear. Tyson says that, as an overweight kid with asthma and glasses, he was bullied in his gang-ridden neighbourhood until he discovered a talent for hurting people. As a wild teenager, he was mentored by famed boxing trainer Cus D'Amato, who channelled Tyson's killer instinct but left him ill-equipped to function in society (the full story is told in Barbara Kopple's 1993 documentary, Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson ).

D'Amato died a year before Tyson became a champion at 20, and the young boxer, surrounded by lackeys and parasites, blazed through a couple of sensational years and then started to fall apart. After his three-year jail sentence on the rape conviction, he won back the heavyweight crown and then lost it again. And once again, he crashed.

Toback mixes Tyson's long soliloquy with snippets of archival footage, showing that Tyson has been, at least, fairly consistent in his statements over the years. He's been telling anyone who would listen he wasn't raised normally, he mistrusts everyone and feels deeply wounded.

The fight footage, especially from Tyson's first, brutally short matches, is hair-raising; in later years, we see a shambling geek show from a man who, by his own account, is not sure about his sanity.

In Toback's attempts to paint Tyson as a noble figure, he makes a couple of dubious decisions: The overlapping voices, designed to show his self-questioning nature, sometimes sound like a horror-film depiction of schizophrenia. When Tyson lisps aloud Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol , it just seems dopey. Otherwise, Tyson is an absorbing and not-too-uncomfortable experience, so long as you remember there's a camera lens and a big distance between you and the film's violent subject.