I Play Rocky Review: Sly, Success and the Stallone Myth

By Tom Whitfield

“I Play Rocky” runs 2 hours 8 minutes, is rated PG-13, and carries a Critic’s Pick from The New York Times.

The paper’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, calls Peter Farrelly’s biographical comedy-drama a “featherweight movie” and “a quintessential American success story and Disney-esque fairy tale” about the making of the 1976 film Rocky and the invention of its writer-star, Sylvester Stallone.

She says the film’s lightness adds to its enjoyment. Her praise has a limit: the origin story is an altered and, in her view, appreciably sweetened version of Stallone’s life.

Dargis identifies Peter Gamble as the screenwriter and Farrelly as the director. The listing places the film in biography, comedy, drama and sport. Her larger target is Hollywood’s appetite for stories about itself.

She frames the movie as the latest entry in the movie world’s seemingly endless romance with itself, a cycle she dates to before the first studios and expects to continue after the surviving ones disappear. That argument puts the film’s neat mythology under mild pressure, even if the film itself does not.

Anthony Ippolito plays Sly, whom Dargis calls charming. The character moves from hard-scrabbling anonymity in 1970s New York to the first flush of success as a screenwriter and actor, long before becoming the kind of star name checked by a sitting American president, in her formulation.

Sly is broke, hungry and desperate for work. He hustles for jobs, lives in a flop house, then sleeps on the street with a stray puppy he names Butkus.

Dargis describes Sly and Butkus as both mutts in need of shelter. At the movie theater where they work, Sly meets Sasha Czack, played by AnnaSophia Robb. The marquee displays Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which she says signals the New Hollywood that Sly will storm.

Farrelly and Gamble compress their courtship and failures into a brisk hero’s journey: love, struggle, a move to Los Angeles, then more struggle.

Sly also writes screenplays. One night, he watches Muhammad Ali fight Chuck Wepner in what Dargis calls a slugfest. Ali knocks out Wepner in the 15th round.

Dargis identifies the bout as the creative spark: Sly writes Rocky in a frenzied few days and passes pages to Sasha to type. Her summary locates the film’s causal chain in a specific match, though it gives the wider screenplay process only a few sentences.

The more consequential omissions concern Stallone’s family. Dargis says the film draws from his life but alters and sweetens it. It leaves out Stallone’s mother.

It also gives Matt Dillon a banana-sized schnoz while he plays Frank, Sly’s cruelly undermining father. Dargis contrasts that softened portrait with The Steps, Stallone’s recent and, in her view, entertaining memoir, which treats his parents far more toughly.

The comparison sets a clear limit on the movie’s biographical claim: it reproduces selected facts and risks a smoother self-portrait.

What does the film change about the Rocky myth?

It shifts the emphasis from the finished 1976 film to its supposed origin, showing the New York hardship, the partnership with Sasha and the act of drafting the screenplay. For a viewer seeking the story behind the character, that is the practical gain.

For a viewer seeking a fuller account of Stallone, Dargis’s point is that the omissions matter, especially when the film smooths over the harsher family material in The Steps.

Dargis locates Stallone’s ascent in the steps outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art and his path to the Academy Awards stage. She argues that the film hooks viewers early because of the outsized role Stallone has played both on screen and in American culture.

Her analogy is a biopic of a Founding Father, except with Popeye biceps and a sensuous mouth; by the 1980s, he had become a world-recognized avatar of big Hollywood bloat and, by extension, the country itself.

Her verdict is warmer than the film’s biographical omissions might warrant. Farrelly and Gamble have made a brisk, sentimental origin story with a vivid puppy, a theatrical meeting place and a 15-round boxing match as narrative anchors.

Its clearest achievement is not an exhaustive portrait of Stallone, but a demonstration of how easily a famous career can be compressed into a likable rise.

On Dargis’s terms, the film protects the myth more fully than it explains it.