I PLAY ROCKY Review: Making Of Biopic Leans Heavily into Underdog Nostalgia

For Sylvester Stallone (Anthony Ippolito), a little-known, struggling actor-turned-screenwriter, the phrase “I play Rocky” in Peter Farrelly’s (Ricky Stanicky, The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Green Book) biopic about the making of 1976’s Best Picture winner, Rocky, becomes a life-altering mantra, an expression of supreme self-belief.

 

Time and again, Hollywood producers Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne) and Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell) return to the actor-turned-screenwriter and his screenplay, increasing their offer, sometimes doubling or even tripling it, but Stallone remains steadfast. Stallone will sell the script to Winkler, Chartoff, and their studio boss, Sandy Maddox (an imperious Tracy Letts), only if he gets to play the title role himself. 

 

While the audience certainly knows the outcome (he holds out, wins the role, and goes on to mega-success), I Play Rocky takes pains to make that outcome a major, potentially crippling experience for Stallone and his first partner-in-life and wife, Sasha Czack (AnnaSophia Robb). Stallone’s rough, working-class upbringing, complete with an abusive, irredeemable father, Frank Stallone Sr. (Matt Dillon), and, at least in screenwriter Peter Gamble’s depiction, a nearly absent mother, an unconscionably indifferent school system, and periodic homelessness or near-homelessness, has left him not so much with a grudge against the world, but a belief in himself, his talents, and his abilities bordering on the pathological. 

 

Pathological or not, Stallone's near-superhuman drive to prove himself worthy, worthy of respect, worthy of admiration, and, of course, worthy of love (family, friends, fans) led him, if not inexorably or inevitably, into turning a lifetime of rejection, pain, and loss into the template for an underdog story (American sports division) about a middling club boxer on a downward spiral into oblivion who lucks out thanks to a bicentennial stunt orchestrated by Apollo Creed (Stephan James here, Carl Weathers then), the world heavyweight champion, to give a nobody like Rocky Balboa a chance at the title. 

 

I Play Rocky parallels Stallone’s life experiences, specifically his late 20s, with Rocky’s fictional rise. Taking the “write what you know” advice every screenwriter receives to heart, Stallone turned Rocky into his virtual stand-in, and audiences responded, turning the modestly-budgeted sports drama into a major box office hit and an awards contender the following year. Rocky became an everyman, a working-class avatar, struggling to survive during the recessionary ‘70s decade, finding their individual and collective way forward blocked by economic, social, and political factors. 

 

Covering a short period in Stallone’s life, roughly 1974 through 1976, I Play Rocky opens not in Los Angeles or in Philadelphia, where Rocky was later filmed, but in New York City, as Stallone, using “Mike” as his first name, shuffles from one failed audition to another, one odd job after another, and finally the “meet-cute” where Stallone, a ticket taker at a local movie theater, crosses paths with Sasha. Instantly smitten, Stallone uses a combination of charm, self-deprecating humor, and emotional vulnerability to win over his future wife.

 

From there, I Play Rocky flashes forward 18 months and a baby later as Stallone and Sasha, dreamers both, find themselves with few resources and potential eviction in their futures. Stallone’s screenplays haven’t sold (they will later), and despite a favorable response from Winkler and Chartoff after he slips another screenplay into their hands, he’s still on the outside looking in. Despairing, if not quite broken yet, Stallone sits at a bar and watches Muhammad Ali almost lose to Chuck Wepner, a lightly regarded heavyweight who took an unprepared Ali the distance in a fight that was never predicted to go a full 15 rounds.

 

And thus, of course, the fictional Rocky was born. (Stallone and Wepner later settled a lawsuit out of court.)  To Rocky’s past and future life as a boxer, Stallone added gritty, lived-in details and, more importantly, dimensionality to an otherwise stock down-and-out character desperate for one last chance at victory in the ring. Stallone didn’t just want to play Rocky because he created the character and wrote the screenplay, but because, at least in his mind at the time, there was no one else alive who could play Rocky as well as he could.  

 

The remainder documents the on-location filming in Philadelphia, a city chosen not because of any special relevance to Rocky or the story, but because it was significantly cheaper to shoot there. More a guerrilla-style production than a typical Hollywood one, Charter, Winkler, and their director, John Avildsen (Jay Duplass), selected less for his directorial talents than his ability to work fast and, thus, cheaply, avoid all manner of pitfalls and obstacles, from nosy union bosses down from NYC, a compressed shooting schedule that leaves Stallone physically and mentally exhausted after running close to 20 miles in a day, an unfrozen slab of beef in a meat freezer, and in-film rewrites that could make or break the film. In one notable sequence, budget, time, and Stallone's skating inexperience led to one of the film's most emotionally resonant scenes between Rocky and Adrian/Talia Shire (Kiki Seto).

 

I Play Rocky leans smartly, if sometimes too heavily, into ‘70s nostalgia, the 1976 film itself, and the decades-spanning sequels and spinoffs that followed. That warm glow of nostalgia goes a long way towards excusing some of I Play Rocky’s excesses, chief among them overt sentimentality, a lack of thematic subtlety, and uneven performances outside of the two leads and the two or three main supporting roles. Ippolito delivers a convincing performance as Stallone and (fictional) Rocky. His Stallone-as-Rocky transcends mere imitation or mimicry into something approaching uncanny embodiment.

 

Farrelly has never been a particularly visual director and, outside of one or two sequences, specifically Rocky’s big scene with Burgess Meredith/Mickey (Robert Morgan) during the final days of shooting the film, I Play Rocky too often looks, sounds, and feels like it was made for a late-night cable watch, not a theatrical release produced to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a stone-cold American classic.