It taps into the love of "Rocky" that's never gone away, showing you how the movie found its meaning in the idiosyncrasy of its creation. For a biographical drama to work, it’s not required that the central actor do a pinpoint uncanny, so-close-to- the-real-thing-you-might-think-it’s-the-real-thing impersonation of the person he’s playing. But Peter Farrelly’s “I Play Rocky” may be a special case.
It’s a movie about the making of “Rocky” — about how Sylvester Stallone, then a two-bit actor in his late 20s, dreamed it, wrote it, sold it, and insisted he play the lead role in it. Since “Rocky” is one of the most popular and beloved movies ever made, and Stallone one of the most famous stars in the history of Hollywood, it’s actually essential for the actor playing him to get it right. If not, we would just be in cheesy-tacky TV-movie land.
Anthony Ippolito, who plays Sylvester Stallone in “I Play Rocky,” gets it just right. He looks startlingly like Stallone: the droopy dark eyes, the slightly jutting lips with the delicate dip at the center, even the skin tone — that sort of peach-ivory pallor. And Ippolito’s impersonation of Stallone’s voice is a miraculous act of channeling.
He gets that super-low back-of-the-throat growl, the mush-mouth intonation, the words dripping out like molasses, the sense that his whole personality is a slow-motion amiable grumble. Watching and listening to Anthony Ippolito, we can believe that Sylvester Stallone is standing right in front of us, though the performance is more than just an awesome impersonation. He’s truly playing Stallone — the sweetly stubborn and dogged person he was at the time.
But in a funny way I found the film to have a surprising spirit in common with “Nouvelle Vague,” Richard Linklater’s 2025 drama about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.” Linklater’s film was also a rich piece of nostalgia (the high-end black-and-white cinephile version), and what made it work, apart from the sheer meticulous authenticity with which Linklater recreated the shooting of “Breathless” in the streets of hotels and cafés of Paris, was that Linklater captured the revolutionary form-follows-function dimension of what made “Breathless” a great movie — the fact that Godard made it up as he went along, and how that radical spontaneity worked its way into the DNA of the film. The story told by “I Play Rocky” isn’t nearly as different from that as you might imagine. As written by Peter Gamble, the film opens in New York City in 1974, when Stallone is living in a Times Square fleabag, doing all he can to get acting jobs, though it’s not going anywhere.
All he gets offered are roles like “Thug #2” (which he tries out for in the opening scene). He has no money and gets kicked out of the flophouse, where he meets a homeless pug who becomes his pet. He’s so down-and-out he’s reduced to trying out for a soft-core porn film (Stallone was actually in one, though that was back in 1970).
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