Review: ‘I Play Rocky’ Is A Rock Solid Underdog Story

I Play Rocky should be a disaster. A biopic about the making of Rocky is an exercise in redundancy. Rocky is already a biopic about Sylvester Stallone.

Stallone himself has said that for 50 years. In a 1977 interview, he told Barry Norman of the BBC that he created the character of underestimated club fighter Rocky Balboa as an outlet to express his personal hopes and frustrations about his life.

“I said ‘Jeez if i can take my plight as an actor and put it into a real underdog, that being a boxer, and tell my story — like I couldn’t get an agent and he couldn’t get a manager. I had no love in my life at the time and he didn’t either and so on and so forth,” Stallone explained. (“I have to do this because this is really my story. This is my autobiography,” Stallone added in the documentary The Rocky Saga when asked why he turned down more than $250,000 for his Rocky script in favor of $20,000 and the chance to play the character of Rocky.)

Stallone even told Norman in that 1977 BBC interview that he did contemplate writing something less allegorical and more openly confessional and dismissed it. “Say I had written [Rocky] about a struggling writer in California, in Hollywood,” he continued. “And here he is bumming around in his convertible with his sun tan, but his scripts aren’t selling. So what? At least he has a tan? It just doesn’t work.”

The only reason I Play Rocky works is Anthony Ippolito. For years, film critics’ go-to biopic dismissal has been “[Actor looking for awards consideration] isn’t giving a performance; he’s just doing a bad SNL impression of [famous historical figure].” Ippolito’s work as Sylvester Stallone in I Play Rocky is the opposite.

It possesses all the superficial hallmarks of a great Saturday Night Live impersonation; the look, the body language, the voice. (My god, the voice. No one else on Earth has ever sounded like Sylvester Stallone — and Ippolito sounds just like him.)

But Ippolito’s work goes beyond superficial mimicry. He embodies the plucky underdog energy that audiences fell in love with when they saw Stallone as Rocky in 1976. He captures Stallone’s wry humor, his wellspring of rage at his shabby life and rough upbringing, and the soulful sensitivity he put into his most famous fictional creation. It’s not just an impressive caricature. It’s a total spiritual embodiment.

Peter Gamble’s script follows Stallone before he became “Sly,” back when he still went by “Mike” because he struggled to pronounce Sylvester as a child. Mike desperately wants to make it as an actor in 1970s New York City, but no one can see past his tough-guy physique and gravelly speech patterns. Things get so bleak after a series of misfortunes that Stallone winds up sleeping in the street, where he’s dismissed as a “bum” — the insult that boxing fans will eventually hurl at Rocky— by a passing policeman. The only thing that finally pulls him out of the gutter is a gig in a shabby, softcore porn film.

Later, Mike supplements his acting income with a job at a movie theater, where he hits it off with the ticket seller, Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb). Even Mike’s dismissive, discouraging father (Matt Dillon) likes Sasha, and encourages his son not to screw the relationship. For her part, Sasha encourages Mike to embrace his real name and to bet on himself. If no one will give him an opportunity as an actor, she says, he should create one for himself as a writer.

A few years later, Stallone and Sasha are married and living in Los Angeles, where Stallone has a desk full of scripts no one wants. When a friend introduces him to producers Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell) and Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne) he’s determined to finally break through. He sells them a screenplay he dashed off in three days, inspired by a fight between Muhammad Ali and “Bayonne Bleeder” Chuck Wepner, a massive underdog who managed to knock down the champ and survive into the 15th round. Winkler and Chartoff love the script — but hate Stallone’s request that he play Rocky himself. They offer him more and more money, but Stallone rejects each subsequent paycheck, insisting over and over “I play Rocky.” (Cue the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme.)

Once Stallone finally gets the producers to agree to his demands, he must make Rocky with a minuscule budget; if he goes a single day over budget, United Artists holds the contractual right to fire and replace him. So Stallone, like Rocky, must push through endless adversity to achieve his dream.

This is not exactly the most suspenseful business negotiation ever captured on film; everyone watching I Play Rocky knows how it ultimately turned out. (Spoiler alert: Sylvester Stallone was not fired as the star of Rocky.) Likewise, many of Rocky‘s most famous behind-the-scenes stories — like Carl Weathers (Stephan James) nearly blowing his audition by insulting the poor performance screenwriter they had play the scene with him (AKA Stallone) — have been told many times in various documentaries and DVD supplemental features. Rocky fans won’t find much new or surprising.

That’s why Ippolito’s performance is so key. Despite our knowledge of how Rocky turned out and where Stallone’s career went, he finds ways to get us invested in his story through sheer force of charisma. Like Stallone himself, he’s an undeniable (if unlikely) star. He’s also got the right touch for I Play Rocky’s lighter moments, which get a fair amount of emphasis from director Peter Farrelly, who has not completely forgotten his roots in broad comedies now that he mostly makes prestige historical dramas like the Oscar-winning Green Book.

I guess I didn’t learn the lesson of Rocky myself, because I had pretty much written off I Play Rocky before I saw it. What more needed to be said about this film and its extremely famous rag-to-riches backstage story? Not much. But it’s not what’s said here, but how it’s presented, with a level of warmth and uplift worthy of its source material. Unlike in Rocky, there’s no question whether Stallone will go the distance. But damned if we don’t pump our fists when he reaches the top of the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps anyway.

RATING: 7/10