IMAGE: Larry McConkey

As a boy, he loves pigeons, so he buys a coop with the money he gets from thieving. A neighborhood bully asks him if he loves pigeons, and when he says he does, the bully takes a bird and snaps its neck. He hits the bully upside the head; it is his first fight, and he wins. He joins a crew of gangsters robbing drug dealers, and because he’s the shortest, he checks the dealers’ pockets for money. He goes to juvie for the one theft he didn’t commit and sees all his old friends; it is “like a class reunion.” He is 12 years old. He is a boy like Bert from Sesame Street—loves pigeons, insecure—and he meets a trainer, Cus D’Amato, who looks like Ernie. In upstate New York, away from the thugs of Brownsville, Brooklyn, D’Amato takes him under his wing and teaches him to fight, encourages him, tells him he’s the only reason for an old man to stay alive. D’Amato dies, the boy is alone, and then he is heavyweight champion of the world.

He tells his story in a stream of words; he talks fast. The words are overlapped, sometimes three sentences layered at a time, and the movie is just him talking, and the fights. He is interviewed by director James Toback, who understands him, and is like him: a fast talker, a devourer of women. (Toback once made a movie with Robert Downey Jr. called The Pick-up Artist about the pleasures of being a ladies’ man, and 10 years later made another movie with Downey called Two Girls and a Guy about how it wasn’t fun to be a ladies’ man anymore.) He talks to Toback and he remembers how all the great champions had girls, and says he now wants to meet a CEO type, somebody who will get into the ring beside him even if he’s losing, and he will “dominate her sexually.” He says he never raped anybody.

He is in a macho therapy session, and he is trying to explain. He recites from Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol—an odd choice for a man previously so fond of the word “faggot”—and his own lisping speech patterns, peppered with malapropisms, achieve a kind of poetry. Walking to the ring, he is not an animal and he is scared. In the ring, he is an animal and he is not scared. He has tattooed Maori symbols to his face, to remind himself he is a warrior. (He has also tattooed Che Guevara’s face to his waist, for reasons that are less clear.) People taught him to be this way, and now they are gone. He is alone, and he is not heavyweight champion of the world. He is only Mike Tyson. He has no idea who that is. R.