Concessions

Tyson—a 90-minute documentary about Mike Tyson—is
not at all what you’d expect from a first-person sports narrative (it’s
really just one long interview with the boxer, supplemented with old
photos and fight footage). There’s no grandstanding or blowhard
pomposity or hollow equivocation about why the champ eventually fell.
It just is what it is: a sad, guileless, freakishly candid story told by a gigantic child who could kill you with his hands. IT IS
AMAZING.

In his infantile lisp, Tyson begins with his
childhood—essentially parentless—in Brooklyn, where he’s
mercilessly bullied (one kid pops the head off of Tyson’s pet
pigeon in front of his eyes). He gets into trouble; gets out of
trouble; meets his mentor and trainer, Cus D’Amato; and becomes a
heavyweight champion by age 20. The footage of a seemingly invincible
young Tyson is mind-blowing—like, let’s just go ahead and cancel
boxing forever, because Mike Tyson has defeated all of boxing. When
Mike Tyson punches you, you have no choice but to fall down. Mike Tyson
wins.

But what’s really fascinating about the film is the wide-open door
into Tyson’s emotional life—every word unabashedly damning and
tragically childlike. He’s terrified of the world, he says. He weeps
openly while talking about D’Amato (his reaction to D’Amato’s death: “I
don’t have my friend no more”). He describes a burning sensation during
his heavyweight championship bout: “Musta been a prostitute I had sex
with, because I had contracted gonorrhea. Either a prostitute or a
very filthy young lady.” He’s devastated by his rape conviction,
for crazily misguided reasons: “I may have tooken advantage of women
before, but I never took advantage of her.”

And, of course, Tyson says and does insane, frightening, horrific
things, like bite off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear, live in front
of millions of people (one of the most amazing things to ever happen in
pop culture EVER). But his life, reframed as it is in Tyson,
becomes bizarrely sympathetic—a full-on Of Mice and Men situation (he just hugged Robin Givens too hard!). Tyson is not a fully
functioning adult; he’s a bewildered, mentally ill drug addict with no
impulse control who got punched in the head every day for 20 years.
What makes the film work is that he admits it all without self-pity and
asks for no forgiveness. “I’m sorry I let everybody down” has to be
the saddest sentence in the English language.