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We first see Anthony Ippolito sauntering into a harsh spotlight in I Play Rocky’s opening frames. He’s squirrelling around an audition space, physicalizing the battle between his nerves and the stubborn self-confidence that gets him into those rooms, knowing casting agents typically count him out. He collects his wits, puts his chest out to perform as “Thug #2”, and bellows out the lines, in that deep slow growl as though he’s speaking while chewing through a New York striploin. We don’t find out if his character got the “Thug #2” gig, but in those opening moments, Ippolito nails his part as Sylvester Stallone.
Ippolito is a casting coup for I Play Rocky, Peter Farrelly’s lightweight comedy about the making of Rocky, which leans hard on easy nostalgia for the 50-year-old Oscar-winning crowd-pleaser. His looks, physicality and performance are so on point and uncanny that I never broke away from seeing Stallone, not even when he’s recreating scenes so firmly lodged in mine and pop culture’s memory. The movie’s title says more than it lets on, because Ippolito doesn’t just play Sylvester Stallone playing Rocky Balboa. His performance, perhaps intentionally, blurs the line between Stallone and Rocky. When Ippolito’s Stallone is flirting with his soon to be wife Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb, soulful) or sitting in an office sparring with producers Irwin Winkler (PJ Byrne) and Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell), trying to convince them he’s worthy of a shot, I saw Rocky.
The difficulty when separating the two is part-and-parcel with the material. I Play Rocky can at times feel like finding a trap door into remaking Rocky, because Stallone poured so much of himself into the character. Both are muscular, soft-hearted men who work in the gutter but strive for greatness, whether it’s in the ring or in front of the camera.
How Stallone got in front of that camera begins with Stallone, the struggling actor, walking into a bar. There’s a fight on TV, Chuck Wepner versus Muhammed Ali. The bartender figures Ali is going to drop the schmuck in three rounds. Wepner ends up lasting nearly all 15, getting the entire bar to cheer on their feet and root for him as opposed to Ali. That’s how Rocky was born.
This is a fitting subject for Farrelly, the director of 2018’s Green Book, a reverse Driving Miss Daisy, in which the boisterous Italian bouncer Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) is hired as a chauffeur to concert pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali). Like Stallone, Farrelly made an Oscar winner about a white man whose story was deemed worthy of a movie because of his proximity to a great Black man.
You could also feel the director’s genuine affinity for these characters, whose fish out of water scenarios can be traced all the way back to Dumb and Dumber, one of the many delightfully crude comedies Farrelly made alongside his brother and co-director Bob. Farrelly’s left turn to making a crowd-pleasing dramedy courting Oscars in Green Book was received as an unexpected level up, as if he had entered a more “refined” class of prestige storytellers. Green Book’s Tony Vallelonga and Stallone are exactly Farrelly’s brand of heroes, working class louts on the surface who no one expects to be as perceptive and wise as they actually are, muscling their way into the wings of high society concert halls or meeting rooms with Hollywood execs.
I Play Rocky has a field day with those Hollywood meetings. Farrelly and screenwriter Peter Gamble scrub out Stallone’s agents from the narrative so that they could instead stage riotous scenes with the actor in the room. Stallone gives a dumbfounded but resolute stare as producers incrementally raise the price for his script, up to $400,000, if only the writer would give up his dream of playing the lead role in favour of Clint Eastwood or Ryan O’Neal.
Farrelly wrings the most wicked laughs from standoffs like these throughout I Play Rocky, where he can lean into the skillset that made hits like There’s Something About Mary all-timers. If comedy was boxing, he’s an ace at cooking up scenarios that hit with a jab, cross, hook, occasionally landing an upper caught that got the Toronto premiere audience to their feet.
But after that initial test of wills, I Play Rocky largely settles into fan service mode, moving through the production of Rocky, recreating the most memorable scenes with a viewfinder remove. When Rocky sprints up those steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Arts, we’re not just rooting for him but also the Steadicam making that historic shot possible.
Scenes that can feel perfunctory are often saved by the rotating supporting cast. Stephan James warms things up with his lovely jive talking impression of the late Carl Weathers. Jay Duplass is a riot as director John Avildsen, who insists they’re not making a boxing movie, but a character study in the ring. PJ Byrne is the scene stealer as Winkler. He’s hilariously caught between immovable figures like Stallone and the fictional, cynical studio boss played by Tracy Letts, spiralling out because the former doesn’t know the first thing about making a movie while the latter is on his ass because no one understands the movie they’re trying to make.
It’s all very amusing but I Play Rocky rarely has pathos in its corner. Save for some truly touching moments involving Stallone’s struggle to care for his dog Butkus, it’s often as emotionally vacant as Stallone’s stare. So many of the psychological stakes and insights are written shorthand, soundbites about traumas and insecurities are calculatingly delivered by Matt Dillon’s Stallone Sr and a wonderful Robb as Stallone’s first wife Sasha Czack. The latter drops the most insightful line about the actor’s desperate need to be seen, which Farrelly and writer Gamble refuse to mine for more.
Instead, they just lightly unpack the big emotional swings in the 1976 original, hoping their prime source does all the heavy lifting.
Rocky packed a punch. I Play Rocky appreciates that and settles for some good tickles.
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I Play Rocky is premiering at the Toronto film festival and opens in cinemas on 6 November
