movie review
I PLAY ROCKY
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Running time: 128 minutes. Rated PG-13 (strong language, brief sexual material, and smoking). In theaters Nov. 6.
Fifty years ago, a small-budget movie about an underdog boxer from Philly, written by and starring a totally unknown 30-year-old New Yorker, became an unlikely triumph.
Even its studio, United Artists, showed little faith in it. “Rocky” got a measly $1 million budget and was denied a glamorous red-carpet premiere.
A half-century later, “I Play Rocky,” “Green Book” director Peter Farrelly’s new movie about Sylvester Stallone’s Balboa-like battle to make and star in his passion project, has felt similarly underestimated since it was announced.
Like Stallone, 27-year-old leading man Anthony Ippolito from Long Island has few credits to his name. Who is this guy? The trailer got mixed reactions in July, and “I Play Rocky,” which had an enthusiastic world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival Saturday night, seemed destined to end up a polite behind-the-scenes Hollywood true story, like “Hitchcock” with Anthony Hopkins.
Well, it’s a whole lot better than that — stirring, inspiring, surprisingly hilarious and easy to love. For the first time in a while comes along a biopic in which we don’t already know every beat and detail of what’s being depicted. And refreshingly, it’s not reverential or museumish, but created in the off-beat, tenacious, can-do spirit of “Rocky.”
This movie is not more lazy conveyor-belt nostalgia in which we’re pacified by hearing old songs and seeing familiar faces. The audience actively roots for Sly.
Although composer Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now” theme isn’t heard for more than an hour into “I Play Rocky,” we get chills the entire runtime as if it’s playing on a loop.
When producers Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne) and Bob Chartoff (Toby Kebbell) finally relent and let Stallone play the main role in the movie that he poured his heart into and wrote in just 3 ½ days, he might as well have run up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
But success doesn’t come easy. Before he signs that low $21,000 contract, we see Stallone in NYC back when he had barely $300 in the bank and was working jobs at a fish market and briefly in softcore porn. Not able to afford a $7.50-a-night fleabag motel anymore, he sleeps on the street.
It’s in those early scenes that we first meet the excellent Ippolito. The initial encounter is reminiscent of seeing Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown.” At the start, you have to get used to a very distinctive voice, to say the least, coming out of another man’s mouth.
However, Ippolito’s performance, like Chalamet’s, is not a skit’s caricature. Never over the top, he captures a tenderhearted, well-read, hardworking dreamer who just so happens to have a gym rat’s body. And importantly Ippolito radiates a movie star’s energy.
Sly meets his future wife Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb, a chemistry class), and they move to LA so he can pursue acting. Screenwriting comes first, though, after he sneaks a script onto a “to read” pile at Winkler and Chartoff’s office. Impressed, the producers of Martin Scorsese’s movies ask him to go drum up something else. Something unique.
One night in 1975, while watching the Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner fight at a bar, Stallone is gripped by the Bayonne Bleeder’s spunk and against-all-odds determination. Not to mention the room’s emotional reaction to his doggedness. Thus, the idea for “Rocky” was born.
The middle of Farrelly’s movie has Stallone playing hardball to ensure he gets to also play Rocky. They want Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood. A big name. Tart-tongued Tracy Letts is so damn funny as Sandy Maddox, a fictional composite of studio execs, who cannot believe he has to deal with this crap.
When Winkler and Chartoff make Maddox watch “Lords of Flatbush,” a 1974 movie Stallone had a supporting role in, Letts bitterly snaps, “Yeah, let’s watch ‘Lords of F–kbush,’.”
Byrne and Kebbell make a tight and quick-witted showbiz comedy duo, like a pair out of a Kaufman and Hart play only with parental care.
The final third of the movie is the unbelievably scrappy filming process of “Rocky.” They change the setting to Philly to save money because there are no unions to deal with there. Stallone has to painfully pound his bleeding fists into a frozen beef carcass. Director John Avildsen (Jay Duplass as a fun crank) uses the brand-new Steadicam, not to innovate but to save time. Carl Weathers (Stephan James) doesn’t know how to box!
And Ippolito finally takes the emotional gloves off as Sly films the fight scene with Mickey at his apartment door while channeling all the people in his life, like his dad, who never believed in him. I was KO’d.
“I Play Rocky” is a rare thing, a film that gets more enjoyable as it goes on — right till the end. There’s no sag. I never once got tired of it. Frankly, I wouldn’t have said “no thanks” to another fifteen minutes.
Which makes me think Farrelly’s kind of a Rocky Balboa himself. The director of the best picture winner “Green Book” seemed down for the count after the deserved failure of “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.”
But paired with a story as absorbing as Stallone’s and an actor as exciting as Ippolito, he’s back in fighting form with “I Play Rocky.”
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