‘I Play Rocky’ Review: Anthony Ippolito as Sylvester Stallone

The winning idea behind screenwriter Peter Gamble and director Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky was to retrace the making of a classic 20th century triumph-of-the-underdog saga by fashioning the behind-the-scenes story into its own rousing shot of underdog triumph. Sure, Rocky was the quintessential boomer movie — the top-grossing film of 1976 and an Oscar winner for best picture the following year. But pretty much every generation since has ensured that it remains an influential pop-culture landmark half a century later, its message of self-belief, resilience and determination against stiff odds still a resonant evocation of the American Dream. Who cares if it’s pure fiction?

The strongest asset the new movie has in its corner is actor Anthony Ippolito, who had previously appeared as another member of the Hollywood star firmament, Al Pacino, in the miniseries The Offer, about the chaotic development and production of The Godfather. Having heard about the Rocky project before casting had even begun, Ippolito sent in a self-taped audition that convinced the filmmakers they had found their guy. That decision turns out to have been unquestionably right, potentially sparking debate as to whether he’s a better actor than Stallone. (Seriously, have you tried watching Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot?)

Gamble’s script starts out in New York, where frustrated young actor Sylvester, then going by Mike, works a series of dead-end jobs while auditioning for the same thankless bit parts as thugs and cops. One of those jobs is ticket taker at a movie theater, where pretty blonde box office cashier Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb), who would become his first wife, catches his eye. 

Stallone’s infamous early foray into softcore porn on a film quaintly titled The Party at Kitty and Stud’s — later re-released as Italian Stallion after Stallone had found fame — is given sanitized treatment as an economic necessity when he is kicked out of his grungy rooming house over unpaid rent and forced to sleep on the street.

The film jumps ahead 16 months, when Sylvester and Sasha have relocated to Los Angeles, still struggling to stay afloat. A friendly customer at the restaurant where Sylvester works as a valet parking attendant gives him an “in” with his producer buddies Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell) and Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne). The meeting yields nothing concrete, but Sylvester slips his script for Paradise Alley into a slush pile on the way out. Chartoff and Winkler are impressed, though not quite enough to option it — the movie would resurface elsewhere two years later as Stallone’s directing debut, greenlit on the strength of his Rocky fame — but they invite him to come back and show them anything else he has written.

Inspired after watching the 15-round Muhammed Ali-Chuck Wepner fight in a bar, Sylvester goes home fired up and cranks out the Rocky script in three-and-a-half days. Chartoff and Winkler immediately go for it and start tossing around possible names to star as the southpaw boxer of the title — Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Ryan O’Neal. But Sylvester rejects the deal, stating his one condition: “I play Rocky.”

There are fun insights into the art of the moviemaking deal, first in Chartoff and Winkler’s negotiations with irascible Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts), a composite studio exec, and next in a protracted back and forth with Stallone, as their offer to buy the script climbs to $360,000, an astronomical fee back then for a first-time screenwriter. But still Sylvester refuses to budge, insisting that he poured his heart and soul into the role and refusing to hand it off to another actor.

While Gamble’s script isn’t exactly subtle about it, the themes of perseverance and force of will that are so essential to Rocky are traced back to Stallone’s unwavering commitment to a part that’s in his bones. Refusing to let the commercially promising project wither and die, the producers opt to halve the already meager $2 million budget agreed to by Maddox, allowing them to cast anyone they want.

The extent to which Chartoff and Winkler are on board with Maddox’s contractual loophole is kept vague. But the budget and shooting schedule are so tight that any overage means Sylvester can be fired immediately and replaced by another actor. To help bring the film in on time, they hire director John G. Avildsen (Jay Duplass), known for his efficiency with fast, frugal shoots.

Since every underdog story needs an antagonist trying to beat them down, Sasha believes the filmmakers are conspiring to sabotage her husband’s involvement by breaking him physically, pushing him to the point of exhaustion. On top of six hours a day of intensive boxing training, they have him run some 20 miles all over the city on the first day of location shooting in Philadelphia (New York was prohibitively expensive). A doctor advises him to stay off his feet for two weeks due to a pulled tendon. But Sylvester knows that would get him kicked off the film.

The most iconic scenes from Rocky — notably the training montage; the sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rocky raising his arms in triumph at the top; the bare-knuckle pounding at frozen sides of beef in a meat storage room; the ice rink interlude with Talia Shire (Kiki Seto) — are recreated with reverential respect for the original, some more effectively than others. But even when all this plays like visual karaoke, anyone with a soft spot for Rocky will likely find themselves hit by a wave of warm nostalgia.

As he showed in his 2018 solo directing debut, Green Book, which won the best picture Oscar the following year, Farrelly is a populist director who feels no compulsion to challenge his audience. In that case, he offered a soft, conciliatory take on the racial divide, while in I Play Rocky, he doesn’t shy away from sentimental excess and even a slight shlockiness. The sainthood of Stallone here is shamelessly manipulative, but it works, restoring a likable everyman quality that’s been obscured by decades of celebrity baggage.

There are stirring breakthrough moments built into the movie, such as a confrontation between Rocky and Mickey, the old-timer who wants to manage him, played by Burgess Meredith (Robert Morgan). Avildsen says the scene as written is not delivering, prompting Stallone to step away for five minutes and return with a semi-improvised reworking of it that socks across the emotional stakes.

The action again jumps forward, to the premiere of Rocky, “ten months and one baby later.” The jittery artist too anxious to sit still and watch his work on opening night is a hoary trope of showbiz movies. But when the movie’s premiere audience stands and cheers in a moment of glory, clumps of the Toronto audience at I Play Rocky’s first screening did the same. Irrespective of Stallone’s political affiliations, this is a feel-good movie that should play equally well across red and blue states.

Farrelly coaxes solid performances from the ensemble, particularly Robb, who makes Sasha the opposite of a mousy wife, lovingly supportive but also tough-talking and opinionated. Kebbel and Byrne are an amusing double-act as Chartoff and Winkler, the latter now 95 and still producing, recently with the Creed movies and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Letts was born to play this kind of brutally blunt, ruthless-when-necessary businessman, and Duplass brings a kind of impish spark to Avildsen, making him seem a director who thrives under pressure.

There are strong moments also with Matt Dillon as Sylvester’s verbally abusive father Frank, who became a hairdresser when his acting career failed to take off; and Stephan James, who has a hilarious intro scene as Carl Weathers, strutting into his audition with the natural authority of Apollo Creed, his muscles packed into a superfly 1970s denim outfit, with his bare torso oiled and glistening.

The element that holds the movie together is Ippolito, who nails the garbled, rumbling diction, hangdog expression and hulking physicality of Stallone while never losing sight of his insecurities at this unproven point in his career. I Play Rocky repurposes most of its emotional uplift from the movie within the movie, but anyone with fond memories of the boxing drama — perhaps those who first saw it back in the day most of all — will feel a surge of elation from the moment Bill Conti’s theme music is folded in.