A brutally frank, no-holds barred documentary about the life of former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson won standing ovations from critics and audiences at the Cannes film festival last night.

Made by director James Toback, Tyson tracks the boxer's career from his days as a teenage thief and drug dealer in Brooklyn to undisputed champion, and his dramatic fall from grace to incarceration for rape.

Mixing archive footage with a serious of revealing interviews with Tyson, and only Tyson, the documentary reveals that the boxer has lost more than $300m in the last few decades and sees the boxer admit he once sought to conquer and possess the women in his life.

Dressed in an elegant dark grey suit with a white pocket handkerchief, an "intimidated" Tyson mounted the stage ahead of the screening at the world's biggest cinema showcase, flanked by director James Toback.

"I've never experienced anything like this in my whole career," Tyson said as he basked in lengthy applause from the packed house.

"I'm an athlete and this is totally out of my field here - it's kind of intimidating."

The retired fighter, who has put on weight in recent years and now has a Maori tattoo around his left eye, flew to the French Riviera from his suburban Las Vegas home with a sizeable entourage for the premiere of Tyson.

The picture combines more than 30 hours of interviews with highlights of his boxing career.

"Jim, he just elicited all this stuff out of me, I don't know how he did it," a visibly moved Tyson said, onstage once again after the screening, as Toback fought back tears.

Toback said he believed he had succeeded in presenting Tyson as a "complex and iconic and noble human being".

He met a teen Tyson in 1985 while directing The Pick-up Artist in New York and cast him in two movies, Black and White in 1999 and When Will I Be Loved in 2004.

Toback interviewed Tyson last year while the ex-champ was in a California rehabilitation clinic for drug and alcohol addiction.

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