Tyson’s Rocky Road : An HBO movie spotlights the rise and fall of a champ. But don’t bet he’s down for the count just yet.

“It contains nothing that is not fully willed.”

--Joyce Carol Oates, “On Boxing”

To see Mike Tyson fight early on in his career was to experience high drama and disbelief. When he turned pro in 1984 (at age 18), the heavyweight division was still lit with the afterglow of Muhammad Ali’s poetry and grace (which is why so many good fighters, like Larry Holmes, seemed surly and brutish in comparison). In a few short minutes of concentrated fury, Tyson erased all that.

It wasn’t just Tyson’s ferocity that was breathtaking--ring history is spattered with the blood of any number of raging bulls. It was the shocking speed and precision that went along with his explosive strength. A Mike Tyson bout was more than a fight; it seemed an act of swift predation. The clean, technical efficiency of his ruthlessness made it all the more terrifying. No one had seen anything quite like it before.

That virtually everyone has seen it by now, or else has seen Tyson up close and personal, to borrow a phrase, is one of the several stiff challenges HBO faces in its bio-pic “Tyson,” which airs April 29. Michael Jai White plays the title role. Others in the cast include George C. Scott, Paul Winfield, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Tony LoBianco and James B. Sikking.

Director Uli Edel cites only one of several conundrums when he says: “The more I researched Tyson’s life, the more difficult it became to get a clear view of what his first 26 years were. You need the wisdom of a Solomon to find the real truth. You talk to 10 people, and you get 10 different points of view.”

Those points of view spread across a spillover of media images unusual even for a high-profile figure like a heavyweight king. There was, for example, the touching account of the elderly trainer Cus D’Amato, who rescued the troubled 13-year-old Tyson from a sure life of crime in the street, took him in as a son and re-created him as a champion.

There was Tyson’s storybook wedding to actress Robin Givens, which quickly degenerated--at least in newspaper accounts--into brutality, misery and spite. We saw pictures of Tyson’s auto wrecks, pricey relics of his despair. And the almost eerie Buddha-like calm--the complete opposite of his ring demeanor--with which he sat next to Givens in that famous Barbara Walters interview, listening to his wife describe him as a manic-depressive and their life together as “a living hell.”

There was the porcupine figure of manager-promoter Don King--he of the electrified hair--popping up everywhere around Tyson, a garrulous angel of darkness endlessly yammering his spiel on America’s greatness in a weird parody of Rotarian boosterism. And, of course, the multiple images of Tyson’s bulky, dispirited figure in custody and then whisked off to jail in Indiana after his 1991 arrest and conviction for raping a teen-age beauty contestant. (He was released from prison on March 25.)

Why do we need a movie? The life itself has been a series: “On tonight’s episode of ‘Champ,’ Iron Mike slugs Mitch (Blood) Green in a clothing store, then has to give Green a rematch in the ring.”

“The challenge is to take these experiences everyone knows, not to relive them, but to explore the relationships of a lot of fascinating, complex characters,” said co-executive producer Ross Greenburg. “HBO is the only network that could do this.”

Greenburg was referring to the uncommon advantage HBO enjoys in moving the facts of Tyson’s career into the drama of his life: The network owned the broadcast rights to Tyson’s early bouts, which Greenburg produced under the aegis of HBO Sports.

“I was in Troy, New York, in 1984 for Tyson’s first nationally televised bout,” Greenburg said. “For 1 1/2 hours, from the time he entered the arena to the time he left, I felt this incredible sense of electricity. Over 10 or 11 fights, I got to know him as a person as well as a fighter. He was a sensitive, endearing, soft-spoken kid then. When I saw the changes begin--Cus dying, Mike’s eroding ties with the few people he trusted--I think I sensed trouble coming. The people who helped him in the ring couldn’t help him outside of it.”

B io-pics of the living are notori ously difficult to bring off, not just for legal and familial reasons but because only the long-dead seem amorphous enough to fill up the individual variety of people’s imaginations and experience. (Would we be able to understand Richard III’s evil cunning as well were he alive today and plastered by the tabloid press and TV, and reinterpreted for us by psychology pundits?)

If this weren’t enough, the bottomless world that opened like an abyss under Tyson’s feet as he grew prominent is an encoded black universe--full of gravity fields, nuances, invisible pressures and tacit understandings--that has evolved out of a history of necessary racial guardedness. And largely inaccessible to outsiders.

Greenburg was raised in the affluent white enclave of Scarsdale, N.Y. The only thing black in Uli Edel’s upbringing is the name of the forest he grew up in, as the son of a German military officer who settled in a farming village on the Rhine. (Edel discovered the movies as a lonely Jesuit school kid living in a monastery in a place called Chezwitz.)

Screenwriter Robert Johnson shares his name with a great blues singer but little else. He has the chiseled good looks of a daytime soaps star; before he went to UCLA film school, he was a theater major at UC Santa Barbara--hardly the site of any simmering inner-city stews, let alone the pit-bull ambience of the prize ring.

Still, if race and class determined everything, the mass of Western humanity would still be working the slag heaps of the Pharaohs. Art is nothing if not an exercise in elective affinity; Edel and Johnson labored to explain their effort to make “Tyson” transcend its particulars.

“My decision to do ‘Tyson’ was not based on being a boxing fan, though I am now,” Edel said. “I wasn’t even here when they made the decision to do the film. I was in Europe. But I saw this as a coming-of-age story. A boy from Brownsville in a few years becomes one of the greatest heavyweights of all time, and one of the richest. The world pays him a fortune for being violent in the ring. It must not be so easy at the age of 16, 17, to realize that the ring is the only place in the United States where homicide is legal.

“I could also try to explore a little more closely what boxing in America means. It’s not as big in Europe. I was interested in the relationship with Cus D’Amato, who is played by George C. Scott. This is like a modern Icarus story. The father builds wings for his son so the boy can escape. But he flies too close to the sun. His wings melt and he plummets to Earth. Could it have been done differently?”

Edel, who directed “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and “Body of Evidence,” has taken pains to go beyond the lurid images that have defined Tyson in the public eye. (Tyson himself has refused any participation in the movie, which is based on the book “Fire and Fear: The Inside Story of Mike Tyson,” written by former world light-heavyweight champion Jose Torres, who was also a D’Amato protege and close friend of Tyson.)

“He has a lot of light in him, and a lot of darkness too,” Edel said. “But I’m a director, not a judge. I didn’t want to put him on trial again. I hope people will understand a little bit more before forming an opinion.”

As for bridging the racial divide, Edel said, “I’m married to a black woman. There are always blacks coming in and out of my house. So I try to understand the problem of racial tension a little bit more.”

Edel concedes he didn’t always get high marks for his effort:

“There was a lot of animosity when I started on the project. The most asked question was ‘Why you? Why not one of us?’ There was a feeling of ‘us guys and you guys.’ Clearly there was a separation. But I said, ‘Why not?’ The danger was in giving in to stereotypes, saying the white guys were good guys and the blacks, like Robin Givens and Don King, weren’t. But you look closer and see this is not the case. Every human being has two sides.”

In Hollywood parlance, Robert Johnson came to the project late, which is to say that he took over from another writer.

“From what I’d heard about Tyson, I thought they had in mind another O.J. story, or a Nancy-and-Tonya thing,” Johnson said of the film’s producers. “I wasn’t aware of what a rags-to-riches tragedy this is, or how it taps into the rich legacy of boxing.”

Asked about his sensitivity to racial nuance, he replied, “I’ve been familiar with the black world most of my life. I grew up near the tracks in Oakland. I’ve played basketball in Venice. I’ve always been hip to the colloquialisms.

“But this piece is not really racial,” Johnson added. “You could never write a fictional character with the disparate sides of Tyson’s character and make him believable. His life story is an allegory of struggle. There’s irony in the fact that he was a man who ruled in his world, but his self-esteem was controlled by women. They were his Achilles’ heel.” (Johnson thinks that Tyson was guilty as charged in the rape case, though the incident took place in what he calls “a gray area.”)

“He may not be formally schooled,” Johnson said, “but he’s a bright, complex guy. A lot of people pulled him in a lot of directions. I think he was bereft of Robin and hounded by the inescapable media glare. And as his power grew, the number of people he could trust became smaller. Everyone who didn’t die betrayed him. Finally it got to where he would say, ‘If you’re tired of the hype, all you need to do is get knocked out.’ I’m not saying he wanted that, but on some unconscious level it was a way out. I think he almost wanted the reprieve of jail time.”

T hen there’s one of the most daunting tasks of all: ring veri similitude. Hollywood has a rich tradition when it comes to boxing movies, and Edel screened “The Set-Up,” “Somebody Up There Likes Me” and “Champion,” among others, before the camera began rolling on “Tyson.”

But virtually all of these movies--with the possible exceptions of “Raging Bull,” the laconically observant “Fat City” and the more steadfastly literal bios, such as “The Joe Louis Story” and Muhammad Ali’s “The Greatest”--had something other than boxing uppermost in mind, usually involving the grisly, parasitic corruption that seeps into a fighter’s heroic flesh as inexorably as time itself.

What any filmmaker is up against is reproducing the unreproducible; for Edel & Co., Tyson’s haplessness outside the ring means nothing unless contrasted with his calculating fury inside it.

As a phrase, “the fight game” is a bit of a misnomer. Even if modern professional boxing worldwide falls under the Marquis of Queensberry rules, gamesmanship is not quite what it’s about. The blood sense stirred by the sight of two stripped-down men in the ring is a primordial event that wires a crowd neurologically, carrying it beyond itself into the fear and suspense of a match.

Or in other words, as Joyce Carol Oates--the latest in a line, dating to 900 BC, of prominent writers on boxing--recently wrote:

“Each boxing match is a story--a unique and highly condensed drama without words. . . . Boxers are there to establish an absolute experience, a public accounting of the outermost limits of their beings; they will know, as few of us can know of ourselves, what physical and psychic power they possess--of how much, or little, they are capable. To enter the ring near-naked and to risk one’s life is to make of one’s audience voyeurs of a kind: boxing is so intimate. It is to ease out of sanity’s consciousness and into another, difficult to name.”

Who can fake any of this stuff?

E nter Michael Jai White as our eponymous hero.

It takes only a few moments of being around 27-year-old White before you begin to think, “This kid may deliver a miracle.” In the film trailer, he shows a fair approximation of Tyson’s boulder-like physique. In person, he’s taller and a bit more slender. A triangular rise of powerful trapezius muscles at the base of his neck holds him in an alert, warrior’s erectness, which stands at the center of a deep, soft-spoken calm. It’s an inscrutability you see in fine athletes at the peak of their form, or in someone who has triumphed over a lengthy ordeal.

White has had a few small roles in movies (“Cadillac Man,” “Universal Soldier”) and television (“Martin,” “Law & Order”), but he hardly shows the keenness of someone on the verge of a major breakthrough. He has been somewhere already.

“It’s my role because it’s my story,” he says, matter-of-factly, as though, once he decided to try out, the 999 other auditioners throughout the country might as well have packed up their jocks and gone home.

“I can’t escape the truth that I was born to play Tyson. There are many parallels. For one thing, I grew quickly. At 13, I was perceived as an adult. I dated and lived with 19-year-old women, went to senior proms. Tyson came from a broken home in Brooklyn. So did I. My family was dysfunctional. No one talked. My father never lived with us. I was a rough kid. My goal was to be the most dangerous man in the world. Why? Like Tyson, I needed armor.”

White was dressed in a dark pullover and leather jacket and sat at a corner table in an upscale restaurant. Among the suits seated nearby, you overheard the line “We don’t touch anything under $25 million.” He wasn’t the least bit self-conscious in scanning the room, taking everything in.

“You see,” he continued, “the more sensitive you are, the more violent you can become. How can you be violent if you don’t feel extremes more strongly than other people? Where else does aggression come from? If you’re a sensitive kid in a world where honesty and humility are considered weak qualities, you’re not encouraged to live close to your nature. You don’t want to accept the fact that things can hurt you. The most violent kids need a game face on to protect a fragile inside.”

Like Tyson, White found a mentor early who would help shape his life out of a core of rigorous self-discipline. His name was Shigaru Oyama, his game was karate, and he, as D’Amato did with Tyson, molded White into championship form. White mentions numerous black belts in various karate styles and the fact that, at one time or another, he’s owned 26 U.S. and regional titles.

Karate, like boxing, teaches concentration, inner focus and what you’re about once you’ve reached the limit of exhaustion. White was also able to understand Mike Tyson in a way few other actors could.

“It’s an amazing thing to be renowned for your physicality,” he said. “People treat you like you have a gun in your hand. It can be a real head trip. But I resented being treated like a pit bull. I think that’s something Tyson learned: People don’t know you. They just know what you provide.”

White grew disenchanted with fighting when, during a bout in Boston, he hit his opponent so hard that the man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed. “The crowd got on its feet and cheered, and I thought, ‘You’re celebrating me because I hurt somebody.’ It was weird, like a Roman thing.”

Eventually, as White puts it, “the mad guy stopped.” A schoolteacher left him a letter of encouragement, urging him to think about college, not knowing how moved and everlastingly grateful a bad-ass teen could be. White enrolled at Southern Connecticut State University, and then the University of Connecticut, as an engineering major. He took classes at Yale, where, encouraged by director Lloyd Richards and playwright Joseph Walker, he began to pursue acting, which brought him to regional theater and points west.

White still runs several karate schools in the Northeast, and he has his acting career to think of now. But he also places high priority on another long-term job--teaching emotionally disturbed children and high school ghetto kids, whom he cautions about the trap of “assigned images,” where “you may think other people, particularly white people, don’t see you the way you really are. But you might be doing the same to them. You have to give everyone a chance.”

White concedes that the makers of “Tyson” were off the mark of racial accuracy at first: “Some dialogue didn’t sound right, but Uli has a great sense of intention. I could say, ‘I’m chillin’,’ but he’d know if I wasn’t. It may even have helped more that he’s foreign. A blind person can have a great ear.”

And a fighter can know a fallen king.*