On The Road With ... Mike Tyson

MIKE TYSON is intimately familiar with life in the can—the ex-champ has done prison time on three occasions. Life in Cannes, however, is a different story. Iron Mike, 41, was in the French seaside resort last week for its annual film festival and the premiere of Tyson, a documentary about his life by writer-director James Toback (Fingers, The Pick-Up Artist). After the screening last Friday a visibly moved Tyson stood before a crowd that gave the film a standing ovation. "I've never experienced anything like this in my whole career," he said. "It's kind of intimidating."

In the film Toback, who has known the fighter for 23 years, intersperses footage from the days when Tyson seemed scared of nothing with clips from an emotional interview done while Tyson was undergoing drug and alcohol treatment last year. ("I may have taken advantage of women before, but not of that woman," Tyson says of the woman he was convicted of raping in 1992. "That [conviction, for which he served three years] still bothers me.") The reviews out of Cannes have been raves; moviegoers can judge for themselves when Tyson is released in the U.S. later this year. And Tyson apparently hasn't gotten introspection out of his system: He says he's working on a memoir with veteran ghostwriter Larry Sloman.