Toronto, Canada – 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. 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 it remains an influential pop-culture landmark half a century later, its message of self-belief and resilience still a resonant evocation of the American Dream.
The strongest asset the new movie has in its corner is actor Anthony Ippolito, who previously appeared as Al Pacino in the miniseries The Offer. 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. 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 thankless bit parts as thugs and cops.
The film jumps ahead 16 months to Los Angeles, where a friendly customer gives him an “in” with producers Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell) and Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne). Inspired after watching the Ali-Chuck Wepner fight, Sylvester cranks out the Rocky script in three-and-a-half days, but rejects the deal with one condition: “I play Rocky.”
There are fun insights into the art of the moviemaking deal, first in negotiations with irascible studio exec Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts), and next in a protracted back-and-forth with Stallone as their offer climbs to $360,000. The most iconic scenes from Rocky—the training montage, the sprint up the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps, the bare-knuckle pounding at frozen sides of beef—are recreated with reverential respect.
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Farrelly is a populist director who feels no compulsion to challenge his audience, and the sainthood of Stallone here is shamelessly manipulative, but it works, restoring a likable everyman quality. Farrelly coaxes solid performances from the ensemble, particularly AnnaSophia Robb as Sasha, while Matt Dillon and Stephan James deliver strong moments. The element that holds the movie together is Ippolito, who nails the garbled, rumbling diction and hulking physicality of Stallone while never losing sight of his insecurities. I Play Rocky releases on Friday, November 6.
