A documentary by James Toback. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, May 8, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Veteran filmmaker James Toback didn’t set out to create a balanced biography of Mike Tyson when he decided to make the former heavyweight champion of the world the only interview subject on-screen. But in this fascinating documentary (the director’s first), he gives the tattooed ex-fighter enough rope to both hang himself and hoist at least part of his soul out of the abyss.

Examined in a variety of domestic settings, the 42-year-old former champ looks back over his not-so-long career and offers surprisingly pithy, sometimes moving, and occasionally infuriating insights into what went right and wrong along the way. These are integrated with carefully chosen, sometimes overly manipulated highlights of the ear-biting bull’s life in the ring.

Although it’s clear what Tyson thinks of beloved mentor Cus D’Amato and subsequent guru and double killer Don King, scant attention is paid to the end of long relationships with manager Jim Jacobs and trainer Kevin Rooney, nor to recent scrapes with the law. The fighter’s view of his first marriage, and of later arrangements with women, leans toward boilerplate (“I was immature,” et cetera). So I was surprised that he was still so sanguine about his 1992 rape conviction.

His three-year incarceration was, apparently, far from the celebrity vacation many imagined for Tyson, who says he emerged from prison quaking with the same fear of humiliation he suffered as a fat kid with lousy parents in a bad part of Brooklyn. This may help explain his subsequent threat to an insolent journalist, delivered at a comeback news conference, complete with that Michael Jackson lisp: “I’ll fuck you until you love me, faggot”—a line that could fuel an entire season of HBO’s amazing series In Treatment.

In his own poetically mangled language, Tyson’s life has been “a hard pillow to sleep with”.