I Play Rocky review – Anthony Ippolito adds knockout sweetness to the story of Stallone’s Hollywood triumph

Portraying the humour, passion and grit that took the actor from bit parts to Oscar glory, this making-of tale is even more mythic than the original movie

For fun, excitement and the transcendental thrill of success, there’s nothing to touch this very enjoyable drama about the making of Sylvester Stallone’s Oscar-winning 1976 boxing movie, Rocky. It’s a movie of duplicates and surfaces and heartfelt imitations. Perhaps not very profound but, as Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton says, it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

It is the story of the struggling young Italian-American unknown who’d had some minor acting jobs – including softcore pornography – but wrote a thumpingly good screenplay inspired by the underdog white boxer Chuck Wepner, who briefly knocked Ali down in 1975. With tremendous self-belief, Stallone insisted he play the lead role himself, holding out against vast cash offers to just take the writing credit and let an established star into the ring.

It’s a story in which the making-of drama is more aspirational, more Hollywood-mythic, than the actual movie itself. Rocky Balboa is happy to go the distance, lose fractionally on points and earn the love of a good woman. Stallone preserved his writer-star integrity and won himself a massive hit into the bargain. It was written for the screen by Peter Gamble (who, somewhat unsportingly, isn’t given any sort of acting role) and directed with exhilarating briskness, almost like a comedy – maybe that’s what it is – by Peter Farrelly. It is very unlike the way John G Avildsen directed Rocky, which moves at a thoughtful, social-realist pace. AnnaSophia Robb is Stallone’s devoted wife Sasha; PJ Byrne and Toby Kebbell Stallone’s exasperated producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff; and Stephan James plays Stallone’s co-star, Carl Weathers.

As the man himself, Anthony Ippolito is an eerie likeness of the young Stallone. It’s almost a cine-seance: the same face, the same seductively slurred voice, the same ox-adjacent physique (though not as stacked and defined in 1976 as an unclothed man in a comparable role would need to be now). What is so incredible is that Ippolito is no one-trick pony. In the 2022 Paramount+ miniseries The Offer, about the making of The Godfather, he played the young Al Pacino. That was a stunning likeness, too.

I Play Rocky rather shrewdly argues it was the huge success of The Godfather that made Rocky possible (and which in turn made Raging Bull possible). The mafia movie had been revitalised, so why not the boxing movie? And, of course, it was Coppola family member Talia Shire – played by Kiki Seto – who was in both the Godfather and Rocky films, a connection oddly not mentioned here. It’s also a story of guerrilla filming, using the new Steadicam technology and trying to avoid labour-union rules. (Mario Van Peebles’ Baadasssss!, about the making of the blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, had a similar story to tell.)

Ippolito marvellously carries off Stallone’s sweetness, his sense of humour, and disarming refusal to be patronised and underestimated. It makes me think that there’s another struggling writer movie that should now be made: about the Faber publishing executive Charles Monteith, who in 1954 made history by picking out of the loser slush-pile a bizarre novel about a bunch of English public schoolboys who turn feral on a desert island. And as the grumpy alcoholic English schoolmaster and wannabe novelist William Golding … well … why not Ippolito?