It’s been almost exactly 50 years since Sylvester Stallone’s breakthrough boxing classic first arrived in theaters.
“I Play Rocky,” Peter Farrelly’s comic and crowd-pleasing tale about the making of “Rocky,” might seem like a one-two punch of pure nostalgia. You need hardly more than a few Philadelphia steps or a holler of “Adrian” to summon its still-ubiquitous cultural presence.
Stallone is parking cars when he turns down $360,000 — a figure four times the initial offer — to option the script without his casting. Tracy Letts plays United Artists boss Sandy Maddox, a composite character. Byrne and Toby Kebbell, respectively. They are all agog when Stallone, recently homeless, turns down millions, resolute with his demand: “I play Rocky. This is Stallone’s own underdog story, one that neatly mirrors Rocky Balboa’s unlikely rise. The centerpiece of the movie is the negotiation over the script, with Winkler and Chartoff playing middlemen ferrying back-and-forth offers. But you can still sense Farrelly’s affection for moviemaking that follows instinct. A running gag in the movie is how actors exaggerate their talents to win a role. When Carl Weathers turns up to play Apollo Creed, he eventually admits not knowing how to box — a confession Stallone also has to make.
That’s why, while Anthony Ippolito’s winning performance as Stallone may be at the center of “I Play Rocky,” the movie belongs to its skeptical producers and its apoplectic executives. “Rocky” producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff are played by P.J. But it’s the film’s belief in the algorithm-adverse nature of the movies that makes “I Play Rocky” a fun, if featherweight romp. “I Play Rocky” eventually gets to the making of the film, but by then it’s beginning to run out of gas. Once the cameras are rolling — including, the movie acknowledges, an early use of the Steadicam — “I Play Rocky” slides more into nostalgic recreation. In that way, “I Play Rocky” is not so unlike a much different making-of drama: Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” about French iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard and 1960’s “Breathless. That this will turn into the biggest movie of the year makes “I Play Rocky” an affectionate ode to the oft-quoted, frequently forgotten William Goldman quote: In the movies, “Nobody knows anything.”
Some of the best of them are inherently bad ideas. Stallone in his mid-20s had little more to his name than some soft-core pornography. There was scant evidence of audiences clamoring for a boxing drama. And yet Stallone, despite his humble status in Hollywood and, let’s say, unique manner of speech, didn’t just want to sell his script; he insisted on starring in it.
But while “I Play Rocky” is far from lacking in memory-lane sentimentality, it’s more aimed at now than it might appear. Today’s movie industry is so corporate and risk-averse that Farrelly’s “Rocky” revival is most enjoyable as a reminder that the movies are a quixotic, even goofy undertaking. The miracle of “Rocky” is really that someone actually said yes to making it.
