“I Play Rocky” is the latest entry in the movie world’s passionate, seemingly endless romance with itself. That love affair began before the first Hollywood studios were built, and will continue after the surviving ones disappear. Certainly it adds to the fizzy enjoyment of this featherweight movie, a quintessential American success story and Disney-esque fairy tale that’s about the making of the original 1976 “Rocky.” It’s also about the invention of that film’s writer and star, Sylvester Stallone, a striver who climbed the steps outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art on his way to the Academy Awards stage.
Written by Peter Gamble and directed by Peter Farrelly, the movie follows Sly (a charming Anthony Ippolito) from hard-scrabbling anonymity to the first flush of success, long before he became a star name checked by a sitting American president. First, though, Sly has to pull up his bootstraps in 1970s New York, where he’s a broke, hungry aspiring actor. He’s hustling for jobs and living in some kind of flop house; he’s soon sleeping on the street with a newfound puppy, a stray he names Butkus.
They’re both mutts in need of shelter, which Sly finds in the arms of Sasha Czack (AnnaSophia Robb), whom he meets when they’re working at the same movie theater. Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” is on the marquee, telegraphing the New Hollywood that Sly will storm. First, though, the filmmakers skitter through their hero’s journey. Sly and Sasha fall in love, struggle, move to Los Angeles and struggle some more. Sly’s writing screenplays, too, and one night watches a fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner, a slugfest that only ended when Ali knocked out Wepner in the 15th round. Lit by inspiration, Sly writes “Rocky” in a frenzied few days, passing pages to Sasha for her to type up.
“I Play Rocky” draws from Stallone’s life, but alters and appreciably sweetens it. There are some curious choices, like the omission of Stallone’s mother and the banana-sized schnoz that Matt Dillon wears as Sly’s cruelly undermining father, Frank. (Stallone’s account of his parents is far tougher in his recent entertaining memoir “The Steps.”) If the movie hooks you early, it’s largely because of the outsized role that Stallone has played both on the screen and in the American cultural landscape; it’s like watching a biopic of a Founding Father, except one with Popeye biceps and sensuous mouth who in the 1980s became a world-recognized avatar of big Hollywood bloat and, by extension, the country itself.
Farrelly (“Green Book”) is an efficient if not inspired director, and he seems to have never seen a film cliché that he didn’t want to use. Still, he keeps everything moving right along at a pleasant clip, keeping his focus steadily on the characters. He’s solid with actors, though he does better by, and seems more interested in, the men. Robb’s role, that of the cheerleading helpmate, is exasperating, and her accent distractingly broad. That’s a drag, but this is Ippolito’s show. He looks the part and sounds enough like Stallone to make the fantasy work: Ippolito captures the actor’s stuffed nasality, his swagger and, crucially, the vulnerability — and the pain it implied — which made Stallone’s original Rocky work so wonderfully well.
Once firmly in Hollywoodland, “I Play Rocky” really gets cooking. Sly meets the producers Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne) and Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell), who, with haggling and comedy, help shepherd the film into completion. Irwin and Robert often seem more like the supportive parents Sly doesn’t have. Farrelly’s insider status shows in his soft treatment of the industry, which extends to Tracy Letts’s foul-tempered executive, Sandy Maddox, who has a lot of squish under his hard-boiled exterior. The suits generally and instructively outshine John Avildsen (Jay Duplass), the respected director who gave “Rocky” the earthiness that it needed and helped guide Stallone to stardom.
Part of the appeal of “I Play Rocky” is that like its inspiration, it taps into the enduring attraction of underdog stories in which a little guy — on the frontier or in small towns or big — fights the system, bucks the odds and, however bloodied and beaten, emerges triumphant. Rocky is James Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Robert Ryan in “The Set-Up,” Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.” Unlike Brando’s character, though, who’s haunted by his thwarted boxing career — “I coulda been a contender” — Rocky realizes his dream. Released during the Bicentennial, and going against the pessimistic grain that defines much of New Hollywood, Rocky loses the fight but wins the greater battle for self-worth, and in doing so made the audience feel they had done same.
The original “Rocky” was a new movie but it seduced audiences because it felt — and played — like a beloved classic. It was at once of its gritty moment and a callback to an earlier Hollywood, back when idealism was inscribed in every happy ending. By bridging Old Hollywood and New, Stallone created a template for a series that continues to bring in new audiences, sustaining careers while elevating others, including that of Ryan Coogler’s (“Creed”). It’s no wonder the first “Rocky” slayed. Much like its irresistible theme song, it felt like a new fanfare for a new common man. It was exactly the kind of fairy tale that Hollywood once excelled at, one that promised us that — step by agonizing step, push-up by push-up — we too could be heroes.
I Play Rocky Rated PG-13 for smoking and some adult language. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters.
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