Hollywood (Almost) Always Gets Mike Tyson’s Story Wrong

Hulu’s new series Mike could change that—but so far, there’s only been one film about Iron Mike that truly hits hard.

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 Trevante Rhodes and Russell Hornsby in Mike. shown.Courtesy of Patrick Harbron for Hulu.

On August 6th, Mike Tyson revealed his next opponent. No, the former heavyweight champion wasn’t returning to the ring—this time, he’d be battling Hulu, which will soon debut Mike, an unauthorized limited-series biography about him. “Don’t let Hulu fool you,” he warned on Instagram. “I don’t support their story about my life. It’s not 1822. It’s 2022. They stole my life story and didn’t pay me. To Hulu executives I’m just a n****r they can sell on the auction block.”

Premiering August 25th and starring Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes, Mike is an eight-episode series that, according to the producers, aspires “to go beyond the soundbites and tabloid headlines, to create a deeper, more nuanced look at his complicated life, not only portraying incredible events—but asking WHY.” Hulu only made the first five episodes available to critics, but based on those it’s fair to say that the series, despite noble intentions, still doesn’t quite nail Tyson’s remarkable, complex odyssey. But if it’s any consolation to showrunner Karin Gist and her creative team, which includes the I, Tonya duo of director Craig Gillespie and writer Steven Rogers, Hollywood has repeatedly gotten Tyson’s life wrong—not that Tyson has done any better when given the opportunity to control his own narrative.

Tyson has been a pop-culture fixture for more than 35 years, an only-in-America success story who overcame poverty, racism and lack of education to become the planet’s most famous boxer and youngest heavyweight champion. But after his fall from grace—the flameout of his high-profile marriage to Robin Givens, his humiliating defeat at the hands of Buster Douglas and then, most disturbingly, his 1992 rape conviction—the one-time Kid Dynamite went from generational phenom to cautionary tale. And whether it’s Citizen Kane or There Will Be Blood, Hollywood likes nothing more than the story of a great man laid low.

HBO took the first stab at a Mike Tyson story with 1995’s Tyson, a thoroughly mediocre drama that starred martial artist Michael Jai White. Directed by Uli Edel and based on José Torres’ book Fire & Fear: The Inside Story of Mike Tyson, the movie tried to answer the same question as Mike: Why? But Tyson isn’t really the TV biopic’s main character. Instead, Edel looks at the people around Tyson (in particular, Mike’s father figure and instrumental initial trainer Cus D’Amato, played by a hammy George C. Scott), which only succeeds in reducing Iron Mike to a cipher, a cheap narrative riddle we’re meant to solve.

Bookended by Tyson’s conviction for raping Desiree Washington, Tyson incorporates Hollywood’s overused gimmick of selecting a single element from a young man’s life—in this case, his boyhood love of pigeons—to be a tragic Rosebud-like symbol of his lost innocence. (Every Tyson project, including Mike, eventually marvels at the fact that this violent boxer could have such a gentle side around these birds.) And because Tyson is more intrigued by what his rise-then-fall represents in terms of classic American themes of self-reliance and hubris than what the boxer is actually like as a person, those pigeons become a lazy metaphor for the beautiful soul inside this raging bull. When Tyson is sent off to jail at the end of Tyson, you’d better believe we get an image of birds taking flight as a conveniently ironic visual juxtaposition.

Tyson was released from prison about a month before Tyson premiered, and he quickly regained some of his championship belts. But the glow of his comeback faded rather hastily. First he lost to Evander Holyfield, then in their 1997 rematch, Tyson embarrassed himself by biting his opponent’s ear twice. His second marriage collapsed due to his frequent infidelity. His drug use got worse.

But he remained a figure of curiosity for filmmakers, like Oscar-nominated writer-director James Toback, who befriended the boxer at 19. Asking Tyson to play himself in Toback’s 1999 ensemble piece Black & White, and 2004 erotic character study When Will I Be Loved, the writer/director was convinced that Tyson was a worthy documentary subject, and conducted lengthy interviews with the disgraced boxer while he was in rehab. The resulting 2008 film, also called Tyson, captures Mike in a reflective, emotionally vulnerable headspace. He cries when talking about what D’Amato meant to him. He looks back at Washington’s rape accusations with repulsive anger, dismissing her as a “wretched swine of a woman.” There’s no hint of remorse, only defiant insistence that he’s innocent.

If the 1995 Tyson was a blandly-executed celebrity biopic, then Toback’s superb documentary reflected a very male-indie-auteur fascination with raw, complicated masculinity. Despite the somewhat blinkered perspective, this Tyson remains the most compelling and haunted depiction of the man, hinting at the uncharted depths of an athlete who grew up bullied and unloved, transforming himself into a monster so that he couldn’t ever be hurt again. The documentary embodies a pre-#MeToo age in which problematic men were chronicled with pensive awe, their personal failings and incredible talents given equal weight.

Tyson’s rave reviews helped humanize the diminished superstar, setting in motion his cultural reappreciation. Soon after, Tyson delivered a scene-stealing cameo in The Hangover with nary a public protest. Now viewed as endearingly nutty, Tyson parlayed this career revamp into a one-man show that was brought to Broadway by, among others, Spike Lee, who directed an HBO special in 2013, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth.

Wearing a suit and a shy smile, Tyson acknowledges in the special the dark place he was in when he filmed Toback’s documentary, and no doubt Undisputed Truth was intended to highlight the older, wiser Tyson who’s in a better place. But it’s hardly convincing—more a carefully manicured, notably defensive piece of image rehabilitation than a revealing or poignant confessional. Not that Lee doesn’t try his damndest to bulldoze us with the sales job. The crowd obediently claps at each of Tyson’s feel-good statements. They chuckle when he talks self-deprecatingly about his well-documented lows. (Ha ha, that Robin Givens sure was the worst, huh?) As for his rape conviction, well, that’s all in the past, okay? “I did not rape Desiree Washington,” he says as if reading a prepared statement, “and that’s all I have to say about this.” In other words, don’t pay attention to the Old Mike Tyson: What’s important is that the New Mike Tyson is off drugs and has a great family. There are genuinely touching moments like when, near the special’s end, he reflects on the horrible 2009 death of his four-year-old daughter Exodus. But Undisputed Truth is designed to be the opposite of a cautionary tale: It’s a redemption story, another thing Hollywood loves to peddle, no matter how forced it comes across.

It was the same year that Tyson announced he’d be voicing an animated Adult Swim series, Mike Tyson Mysteries, a takeoff of Scooby-Doo that further burnished his reputation by capitalizing on the popularity of his former-heavyweight-turned-goofball persona. But critics started to resist. “The Mike Tyson of 2013 is not a convicted rapist,” Deadspin’s Sam Eifling wrote sarcastically. “How could he be? He’s a cartoon who solves crimes with his friend the pigeon.”

Consequently, a public referendum on Tyson would seem overdue, especially in light of #MeToo. Enter Mike, which uses that one-man show as its framing device, with Tyson (Rhodes) addressing a packed theater as he recounts his highs and lows. But while Mike is more nuanced than the 1995 HBO movie, it’s a victim of the modern Goodfellas-ization of true stories, with Gillespie swirling the camera around in the flashbacks—not to mention having Tyson speak directly to us (a device Gillespie used in I, Tonya as well). Cribbing from the Scorsese playbook, Mike is a glossy, titillating, fact-is-wilder-than-fiction spectacle, letting Tyson’s life serve as a clumsy exploration of sex, race and power in America. The series turns Iron Mike into one more piece of vaguely edgy streaming content.

That said, Mike does contribute one crucial addition to the Tyson Cinematic Universe by allowing Desiree Washington to be a central figure. The series’ fifth episode radically shifts perspective, making Washington (Li Eubanks) the main character who tells her own story of meeting Tyson. It’s the first time that that’s happened in any Tyson project, forcing the audience to question not just whose story is usually told in these situations (spoiler alert: it’s the famous man’s) but also why we’re normally given only Tyson’s side of events.

Mike’s fifth episode ends with Tyson’s conviction and his supporters’ insistence that he’s innocent. We’ll have to wait to see how the show concludes, but despite its many flaws, Mike at least wants to challenge our understanding of the Tyson story. The show feels part of a growing awakening about the narrative around problematic celebrities.

But sadly, as has happened too often, it also feels like a project that doesn’t want to really confront his life on its own terms—and, by extension, examine why it remains so gripping to us. Turns out, Toback had the right approach: At least his Tyson listens, whereas so many others are content to force his story to adhere to tired Hollywood tropes. For better or worse, that was never part of Kid Dynamite’s appeal: He refused to blend in.

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