I Play Rocky Is Endearing, Despite Itself

I could never hate I Play Rocky, no matter how syrupy its tendencies, because I Play Rocky includes a scene in which the main characters meet with director Garrett Brown to check out his new invention, the Steadicam. The producers of Rocky have been fretting about how Brown will physically fit all his necessary camera set-ups into a tight shooting schedule, but, as the director demonstrates, his rig allows an operator to shoot tracking shots without having to bother with a dolly. The creation will enable the famous sequence in which Sylvester Stallone runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and does the arm thing. I Play Rocky will show the sequence once, during its making, and then again, when it plays to an audience. Pandering is pretty much built into the premise of Peter Farrelly’s new movie, which is all about young Sylvester Stallone and the making of his 1976 landmark film. But if I’m going to be pandered to, at least let it be by way of awestruck acknowledgments of pioneering stabilizing systems.

The origin of Rocky is an underdog story about an underdog story. About how down-and-out actor Sylvester Stallone, broke and forever typecast as a meathead thug, wrote a project about a small-time Philly boxer who gets a shot at the championship and then insisted anyone interested in making the movie agree to let him play the lead role. It’s a feel-good story with a guaranteed happy ending, given that we wouldn’t be watching the movie if Rocky hadn’t been a huge hit that made Stallone into a star. This puts it in the sweet spot for Farrelly, who after decades of making gross-out comedies with his brother Bobby, went solo to make Green Book in 2018, nabbing a Best Picture win for a road trip movie that proposed that centuries of dehumanizing racial animus could be overcome by unlikely friendship and some ethnic humor. Say what you will about Green Book, and there’s a lot to say, but Farrelly definitely understands the mechanics of the sort of broad dramedy someone could take their grandmother to see around the holidays. (It’s no mistake that I Play Rocky goes wide on November 20, right before Thanksgiving.)

Farrelly’s dealing with more straightforward subject matter in I Play Rocky, and the result is a movie that’s probably not going to get the same traction with the Academy, but that goes down with stupefying ease. It’s half a stand-by-your-dreams affair and half a let’s-put-on-a-show one, and the latter is what won me over, even if it relies heavily on the secondhand valor of recreations of the original Rocky’s most rousing sequences. For its Sylvester, the movie has Anthony Ippolito, a relative newcomer whose handful of roles, hilariously, also include a turn as Al Pacino on the making-of-The Godfather miniseries The Offer. (In the same way that some actors have iPhone face, just looking too contemporary for period pieces, Ippolito appears to have intractable New Hollywood vibes.) His Sylvester is good, even if it takes a while to grasp the performance beneath the recreations of the voice and the expressions and the walk that swings from the shoulders. According to the movie, there isn’t a lot of light between who Stallone was at the time and the character he wrote, the two of them sensitive bruisers who are more soulful than their muscled appearances would suggest, and whose father figures never believed in them.

Ippolito doesn’t really play Sylvester any different than he might play Rocky, but, without pressing the point too much, I Play Rocky shows how many aspects of the actor’s life become elements in the screenplay, including the way Sylvester self-depreciatingly jokes his way into a flirtation with his future wife Sasha Czack (AnnaSophia Robb), an aspiring photographer and his coworker at an Upper East Side movie theater. In real life, Stallone divorced Czack for Brigitte Nielsen in 1985, but the movie’s is a soft-focus version of the actor who blossoms thanks to the unswerving support of his spouse, who never questions his faith in his dreams, even when they’re on the verge of getting evicted from their apartment while she’s pregnant with their first child. This makes the earlier portion of the movie, in which Sylvester impresses producers Irwin Winkler (P. J. Byrne) and Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell), more trying, given how much it hinges on its protagonist, who’s squeaking by as a valet, turning down increasingly generous offers for his screenplay because he also wants to be the star.

There’s never any real sense of peril to these scenes, though they are juiced by a very funny Tracy Letts as a profane studio exec, or any consideration about what the young family will do if Sylvester’s career doesn’t pan out. Which is why it’s so much more gratifying when I Play Rocky gets to the production aspects, introducing a cocksure Stephan James as Carl Weathers, and a frizzy Jay Duplass as blunt director John G. Avildsen, and all that big talk about believing in yourself gives way to the delirious grind of a film shoot, informed by various bits of on-set mythology. There may not be a lot of there there to I Play Rocky, but its affection for the chaos of filmmaking and the way it sometimes produces magic is palpable, even when we know where this story is going. Especially when we know where the story is going, because the whole point of this enterprise is that we’re going to get somewhere familiar in the end, and we’re going to enjoy the journey anyway.