I Play Rocky: Crowd-Pleasing Movie About a Crowd-Pleasing Movie Has Humour and Heart
By Jim Slotek
Rating: A-
My long-ago first entertainment editor had hard-and-fast rules about how to review. For starters, the reader should know quickly whether you liked the movie/concert/performance you’re reviewing.
Another rule was, “Never review the audience.”
So, by way of breaking the second rule, I’m going to adhere to the first. I can’t remember the last time I left a theatre with as pleased and pumped an audience as the one with which I shared the experience of I Play Rocky.
Anthony Ippolito as Sylvester Stallone and Stephan James as Carl Weathers
And I count myself among their number. It makes perfect sense that a dramatization of the making of the most crowd-pleasing movie of the ‘70s would itself be a potent combination of humour and heart. Director Peter Farrelly comes to the project with the alchemy he previously used in Green Book, while Anthony Ippolito absorbs the essence of a young Sylvester Stallone, who poured his belief in himself into a script about a pug boxer who believed in himself.
There’s a lot of meta in that statement. The meta would go into meltdown if I Play Rocky were to win a Best Picture Oscar, as Rocky did a half-century ago.
But then, Stallone’s story and Rocky Balboa’s have always been conjoined. The story has been told so often by Stallone himself and others, that I Play Rocky is a little like Titanic in reverse. We know how it ends, and yet somehow Farrelly and Ippolito make it feel like, in this telling, Stallone and his dreams could hit an iceberg after all.
The story begins with a meet-cute – not with Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb), his eventual wife, but with a pug-faced puppy he discovers in a dumpster while sleeping on the streets. He names the little fellow Butkus (after the legendary Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus). The connect-the-dots metaphors aren’t exactly subtle, but you don’t pump up crowds with subtlety. Money from a soft-core porn film and a job in a theatre (where he meets Sasha), provide just enough rent money for the three of them to qualify as poor.
But for an aspiring actor (and not-yet-self-aware scriptwriter), L.A. beckons. And with pretty much nonstop encouragement from his pregnant wife, Stallone takes to writing his scripts in longhand (to be typed by her).
There’s a bit of caper-comedy in the planting of one of his scripts at the offices of producers Irwin Winkler (P. J. Byrne) and Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell), who see something in his writing, but are “meh” about the scripts themselves. They send him off, dejected, to think up a story.
It’s well-known that Rocky Balboa was inspired by Chuck Wepner, the “Bayonne Bleeder,” who landed a match against Muhammad Ali that was supposed to be a light workout for the champ. Instead, Wepner went the bloody distance. The spectacle of a man getting a standing ovation for still standing inspired Stallone, and movie history was made.
Of course, there was still the little matter of Stallone’s insistence that he had to star in his story. I Play Rocky is built around this comedic game of chicken, which saw Stallone turn down writer-only offers that reached $350,000, to the consternation of United Artists studio head Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts).
Even when they “caved,” the powers-that-be still conspired against Stallone, imposing a parsimonious budget and an impossible shooting schedule. Farrelly and writer Peter Gamble switch gears at this point, turning I Play Rocky into a film about Hollywood hijinks. (A naked ploy for awards season. Hollywood likes nothing better than movies about Hollywood).
With a bar set by Ippolito, the cast follows suit. (There’s even a background performer we’d like to have seen more of who looks exactly like Burt Young, a.k.a. Pauly).
Matt Dillon plays the worst sort of father and actually makes him likeable. Letts is a heart-attack waiting to happen as the sputtering Maddox, Stephan James puts every bit of ham into his Carl Weathers, and Jay Duplass pours eccentric, sarcastic anger into his portrayal of director John G. Avildsen (who would later recycle the Rocky formula with The Karate Kid).
The rest is tear-duct muscle memory. Of course, there’s a run up the 72 steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And the famous arms-up victory pose belongs to three people at once: Rocky, Stallone and Ippolito.
I Play Rocky. Directed by Peter Farrelly. Stars Anthony Ippolito, AnnaSophia Robb, P.J. Byrne, Toby Kebbell, Stephan James, Tracy Letts. In select theatres November 13, opening wide November 20.