‘I Play Rocky’ Review: Sylvester Stallone’s Wild Hollywood Underdog Story Gets a Punchy Crowdpleaser

TIFF: Peter Farrelly continues his reign of making audience-delighting hits for the TIFF crowd, but this one pulls its punches a bit.

You’re going to see the hits coming with this one. When Anthony Ippolito first utters the title of Peter Farrelly‘s “I Play Rocky” — it’s an admission and an ask, a demand and a plea — the moment is primed for stand-up-and-cheer crowd-pleasing. Such is the case with Farrelly’s entire film, which tracks Sylvester Stallone’s wild, improbable Hollywood success story through the lens of his creation of “Rocky,” often functioning as its own version of that underdog story, presumably because “Rocky” proper isn’t available to be remade and Stallone was not formally involved with the production of this one.

Stallone has long mythologized his rise to greatness, and that’s no knock on him; his rise to Hollywood royalty was crazy and filled with eye-popping twists and turns. The guy sold his dog when he didn’t have enough money! But Peter Gamble’s script sands down those hard edges into something much more made-for-the-movies, a distinctly knotty treatment for a movie that is meant to be about how hard it is to get original movies made.

While the lightness of the film — including an awkward dinner in which Frank Stallone, Jr. (Matt Dillon) giddily admits to beating his kid, mostly played for chuckles — can detract from the much darker stuff that really happened to Stallone, it’s hard to deny the power of a feature so genuinely built to delight. You can see the strings being pulled (the ropes being strung?), but that means it works more often than not. With a big crowd — a man behind me at the film’s second public screening at TIFF guffawed and hooted with such abandon throughout the film that I could only embrace his joy — “I Play Rocky” does exactly what it’s trying to do.

It doesn’t do much more, though.

Stallone’s life story has been threaded through the period just before he started writing scripts and the opening night of “Rocky,” an essential time in the career of a man so dedicated to acting and his craft that it could have ruined him forever. And there’s some light ruin here, including a short stint sleeping on the street (we see literally one night), bonkers financial decisions, and grievous financial choices. Embodied to an almost disarming degree by actor Anthony Ippolito — most people are probably going to get hung up on his impersonation of Stallone’s signature voice, but I’ve never seen anyone make their cheekbones look like Sly’s unexpectedly sunken ones — what feels most real about the film exists because he’s so fully committed to the bit.

And it’s very much to the breakout star’s credit that it doesn’t feel like a bit. While Gamble’s script doesn’t get much further than “this dude just really loved acting,” Ippolito gets pretty soulful here. His Sly (or, as we first meet him during a run of demeaning auditions, “Mike”) is a striver who would likely never call himself “ambitious.” Self-taught, self-educated, and self-aware to a fault, Sly knows he’s not the ideal Hollywood star, but he’s hellbent on showing the world what he’s got.

When is eventual first wife Sasha (a wonderfully calm AnnaSophia Robb) encourages him to just “write a fricking script” worthy of his talents, he does. The first is not “Rocky.” Neither are the seven that follow, but Sly and Sasha still pull up stakes for Hollywood and to chase his dream. No one is buying what he’s selling, though, and even some promising meetings (including one with Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, both played to the absolute hilt by P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell, respectively) end nowhere. A chance encounter — the film’s script lives and dies by those — with a seminal boxing match gives him fresh inspiration, and after just three days, the kid has “Rocky.”

But is he going to be Rocky? Of course, everyone on Earth who sees this film (and plenty who don’t) knows that answer, but what the film lacks in tension, it makes up for in pure grit. Sly learns all about Hollywood negotiations, blustery studio men (a role Tracy Letts was born to play; no one has more fun yelling “Fuck Paramount!” than this guy), and holding fast to seriously deluded dreams. And while the film can flag as we chug through those paces, once “Rocky” is greenlit with Sly in the lead role (and a mess of stipulations, all of them seemingly designed to trip him up), things really start zipping along.

Part of that is due to smart casting. Jay Duplass is a stellar pick for director John G. Avildsen, though anyone who knows anything about Stallone’s on-set approach will chuckle at how much these two seemed to get along (Stephan James should get his own Carl Weathers film now). But more of it comes from the film’s eventual bent toward the mechanics of moviemaking. Come for the high jinks involving beating back union reps (but also, ew?), stay for a subplot about the genius of the Steadicam that is genuinely moving to observe.

That “Rocky” will be a hit is a given — and a fricking huge one at that! — but “I Play Rocky” is far more invested in getting the audience on board with the road it took to get there. And while Farrelly’s approach to this material, extremely glossy and built to delight a wide array of audience members, doesn’t quite speak to the real pain that went into the making of “Rocky,” there’s still plenty here that will make people stand up and cheer. It would, however, be nice if this Hollywood story didn’t feel quite so, well, Hollywood.

Grade: B-

“I Play Rocky” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Amazon MGM Studios will release it in select theaters on Friday, November 6, before going wide later in the month.