Tyson is a knockout.

This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the movie Tyson, James Toback's intensely personal documentary on one of the scariest men in entertainment.

It's perhaps one of the best documentaries I've seen in the last five years.

Forget the fact that I've never seem some of its storytelling techniques used before. The split-screen editing, narration layering (it has WONDERFUL sound editing), complete lack of diegetic sound, and shot selection are category-leading. Mike Tyson is at once both narrator and subject. Sometimes he speaks to an interviewer. Sometimes directly to the audience. Sometimes he's shot long and looks well off-camera.

But the movie is great because of its honesty in depicting Mike Tyson as he truly is. This is, like all of us, a man of contradictions. He tries to be gentle, but in his words, the world keeps dragging him back into rage. He speaks with love about one person--his trainer, Constantine D'Amato, and the rest of the world can go straight to hell. His articulations of fighting in the ring are at one time very much in the nature of sports psychology, but also incredibly vicious. This documentary gives us all a taste of the inner workings of a man whom the media and public have already had kangaroo court. I used to be scared of him. Now I fear and pity him simultaneously.

Go see it. See it to steal storytelling techniques from it. See it because it's good.