I Play Rocky – featherweight but fleetingly engaging

Occasionally, when Hollywood announces a biopic, one wonders if they made up a film purely based on finding an actor with a striking resemblance to someone at least semi-interesting. Such is the case with Anthony Ippolito, who plays Syllvester Stallone in Peter Farrelly’s fairytale-esque dramatisation of the Rocky origin story. Was this entire film constructed purely to draw attention to their striking physical resemblance? Apparently not; the project was announced a full year before the role of Sly himself was cast. Nevertheless, finding Ippolito – who previously played a young Al Pacino in Godfather origin story series The Offer – must have felt like striking gold. This is a film that hinges on his spirited, good-natured performance; without Ippolito, it’s hard to imagine that I Play Rocky would have worked at all.

We meet Sly Stallone as a young actor on the outs in New York City; going by ​‘Mike’, he’s juggling shift work with auditions, though his speech impediment (caused by nerve damage during his birth) and tough guy physique mean he’s restricted to bit parts as a random goons when he’s not shooed out the door entirely. The looming threat of homelessness leads Stallone to acquire a cute puppy and star in a softcore porno, but his eventual relationship with peppy, no-nonsense cinema co-worker Sasha (Annasophia Robb) dutifully turns his life around. They marry, and she encourages him to pursue his acting dreams through writing the roles that directors won’t give him, but when Hollywood finally comes-a-calling, Sly’s faced with the question of how much his dreams are worth on a financial level. If you know anything about the production of Rocky, you can see where this is going. 

It’s a prescriptive fairytale down to the last, with Tracy Letts’ comically villainous Sandy Maddox – a composite character serving as the head of United Artists – the primary source of conflict for good ol’ Sly, and Matt Dillon’s beleaguered Frank Stallone Sr. a secondary, underutilised antagonist. It’s a fascinating film, narratively speaking; completely unchallenging in a way that feels bizarrely compelling, a piece of Hollywood mythologising so blatant and idyllic it earnestly insists that Rocky​’s production was a straightforward David versus Goliath story of the righteous, well-meaning puppy dog Sly Stallone versus the evil studio who wanted to make the film without him. (That’s certainly a convenient story to tell.) 

…And yet. Even within this by-the-numbers biopic so reverential towards Stallone it feels like an ad for a political campaign he hasn’t announced Ippolito exudes a boyish, self-deprecating charm, meshing effortlessly with Robb’s classic no-nonsense-but-ultimately-supportive (first) wife character. He doesn’t just look and act like Stallone; Ippolito is enjoyable to watch, despite the unbridled hagiography of Peter Gamble’s script. This sort of mythologising is ironically indicative of Hollywood as it stands: a business that would rather reminisce about past glories than substantially invest in the future. I Play Rocky is so pleasantly uncomplicated and one-dimensional it’s inadvertantly comical Regardless, one hopes Ippolito has a bright career ahead of him; perhaps one that doesn’t rely entirely on his resemblance to the handsome Italian-Americans of yesteryear.