{"id":623117,"date":"2026-09-13T05:44:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T05:44:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/623117\/"},"modified":"2026-09-13T05:44:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T05:44:14","slug":"i-play-rocky-review-anthony-ippolito-channels-sylvester-stallone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/623117\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I Play Rocky’ Review: Anthony Ippolito Channels Sylvester Stallone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFor a biographical drama to work, it\u2019s not required that the central actor do a pinpoint uncanny, so-close-to- the-real-thing-you-might-think-it\u2019s-the-real-thing impersonation of the person he\u2019s playing. But Peter Farrelly<\/a>\u2019s \u201cI Play Rocky<\/a>\u201d may be a special case. It\u2019s a movie about the making of \u201cRocky\u201d \u2014 about how Sylvester Stallone<\/a>, 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 \u201cRocky\u201d 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\u2019s actually essential for the actor playing him to get it right. If not, we would just be in cheesy-tacky TV-movie land.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnthony Ippolito<\/a>, who plays Sylvester Stallone in \u201cI Play Rocky,\u201d 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 \u2014 that sort of peach-ivory pallor. And Ippolito\u2019s impersonation of Stallone\u2019s 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\u2019s truly playing Stallone \u2014\u00a0 the sweetly stubborn and dogged person he was at the time.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI Play Rocky\u201d is a cleverly crafted crowd-pleaser, all designed to tap into the love of \u201cRocky\u201d that has never gone away (this November it will be 50 years since \u201cRocky\u201d was released). But in a funny way I found the film to have a surprising spirit in common with \u201cNouvelle Vague,\u201d Richard Linklater\u2019s 2025 drama about the making of Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s \u201cBreathless.\u201d Linklater\u2019s 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 \u201cBreathless\u201d in the streets and hotels and caf\u00e9s of Paris, was that Linklater captured the revolutionary form-follows-function dimension of what made \u201cBreathless\u201d a great movie \u2014 the fact that Godard made it up as he went along, and how that radical spontaneity found its way into the DNA of the film.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe story told by \u201cI Play Rocky\u201d isn\u2019t so different. 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\u2019s not going anywhere. All he gets offered are roles like \u201cThug #2\u201d (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\u2019s so down-and-out he\u2019s reduced to trying out for a soft-core porn film (Stallone was actually in one, though that was back in 1970).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first thing that saves him is meeting Sasha, the ticket-seller at the movie theater he gets a job at. They become a couple, and she\u2019s the one who tells him that if he isn\u2019t getting the parts he wants, maybe he should write a script that features the kind of role he\u2019d like to do. Sasha is played by AnnaSophia Robb, who makes her supportive in a spiky way that had me thinking of another \u201970s icon \u2014\u00a0she sounds like she\u2019s channeling Karen Lynn Gorney from \u201cSaturday Night Fever.\u201d (Could the making of that one be the sequel?)<\/p>\n

\n\tSly and Sasha get married and move to Los Angeles, where Stallone finds work as a parking attendant, and he keeps writing scripts. But lightning doesn\u2019t strike until March 24, 1975, when he settles into a bar to have a beer and, on television, starts to watch the championship match between Muhammad Ali and the aging underdog Chuck Wepner. The match is a set-up \u2014 the chance for Ali to knock out his opponent in two or three rounds. But instead, Wepner goes the distance, and even gets in a few major licks. He\u2019s standing, against all odds, after 15 rounds, and that triggers something in Stallone. (Stallone has claimed that he was not inspired to make \u201cRocky\u201d by that match. But clearly the filmmakers decided to ignore him.)<\/p>\n

\n\tStallone has already met with the producing team of Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne) and Robert Chartoff (Tony Kebbell), who constitute a major eruption of ugly geek clothing and bad \u201970 hair, and they like his script for \u201cParadise Alley.\u201d But then he shows them the script for \u201cRocky.\u201d They read it and love it; it\u2019s got something. They want to make the film, and after meeting with Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts), an amusingly blustery-for-the-time-but-now-rather-quaint-seeming studio suit (he\u2019s a fictional composite of several movie executives of the era), they agree to pay Stallone $50,000 for his script, which means that he\u2019ll be off and running. There\u2019s just one problem. As Stallone puts it, \u201cI play Rocky.\u201d That, for him, is the dream and the deal. It\u2019s the only option.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor a while, \u201cI Play Rocky\u201d is a high comedy of negotiation, as Winkler and Chartoff, who have secured a relatively low budget of $2 million to make \u201cRocky,\u201d keep offering Stallone more and more money for his script, and he keeps turning them down. They go as high as $350,000 (a lot of money for 1975). But Stallone\u2019s need to play Rocky is non-negotiable, and the essence of that whim of iron is that it\u2019s the true-life version of Rocky Balboa\u2019s need to be a contender. The pleasure of \u201cI Play Rocky\u201d is that it understands the karmic way in which the story of \u201cRocky\u201d \u2014 the underdog who triumphs against all odds \u2014 was echoed in the saga of how Stallone got the movie off the ground.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe making of \u201cRocky,\u201d which was compellingly chronicled in the 2023 documentary \u201cSly,\u201d<\/a> has an epic irony built into it: the fact that Stallone created one of the most iconic characters in movie history, yet you can absolutely understand why the powers that be at the time didn\u2019t want him to star in the movie. He was a total unknown (they wanted a movie star), but more than that he was an actor who looked half-asleep and sounded like he had a dozen frogs in his throat. Who in his right mind would greenlight that?<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that\u2019s where the story becomes rich. Stallone has Winkler and Chartoff over a barrel; they can\u2019t make the movie without him. And so, worn down at last, they agree to let him star in \u201cRocky,\u201d but they only have the contractual right to do so if they reduce the budget to $1 million. Which is peanuts. But that becomes integral to how \u201cRocky\u201d turned into a great movie.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe director they hire, John G. Avildsen (played with hackish exuberance by Jay Duplass), is known for working fast and cheap, but the budget for \u201cRocky\u201d is so low that he\u2019s going to have to outdo himself. They decide to set the movie in Philadelphia, so that they can shoot it without unions. They\u2019ll use the newly developed Steadicam to glide up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Stallone will pull tendons and bust knuckles punching the overly frozen meat slabs in the lockers, but he won\u2019t be allowed to heal for even one day, because if they fall behind then Sandy Maddox has the right to fire Stallone (which is what he wants to do). Did I mention that neither Stallone nor his co-star Carl Weathers (Stephan James) have the slightest idea of how to box? The production hires a legendary Hollywood boxing choreographer (Trevor St. John), who has staged 14 classic fight movies, but Stallone thinks they all look the same. He wants his own version of realism. And so he and Weathers will figure out how to punch each other.<\/p>\n

\n\tAll of this makes \u201cI Play Rocky\u201d into a high comedy of Hollywood creativity. It\u2019s about the making of one of the biggest mainstream hits of all time, but what it captures is that \u201cRocky\u201d wasn\u2019t just a \u201970s movie; it was a catch-as-catch-can shoestring fluke. (When the producers first play a tape of Bill Conte\u2019s famous theme music, Winkler says it\u2019s ways too \u201cgrandiose.\u201d) And Stallone really did bring his own life into it. The scene where he rages away at Burgess Meredith\u2019s Mickey, retro-fitting Marlon Brando\u2019s \u201cI coulda been a contender\u201d speech, is Hollywood magic, because Stallone draws it out of himself. (He\u2019s really railing at his a-hole father, played in the movie by Matt Dillon<\/a>.) Almost every aspect of how \u201cRocky\u201d was made taps into a desire to see movies echo reality.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI Play Rocky\u201d has some of the slyness of movies-about-real-moviemaking that include \u201cNouvelle Vague\u201d and \u201cBaadasssss!\u201d and \u2014\u00a0the \u201cCitizen Kane\u201d of the genre \u2014 \u201cEd Wood.\u201d But as infectious as the film is, there\u2019s one thing that \u201cI Play Rocky\u201d takes so much for granted it doesn\u2019t quite dramatize it: the way that \u201cRocky\u201d wasn\u2019t just a great movie \u2014 a Frank Capra fable dusted in \u201970s grit \u2014 but a movie that changed America. The New Hollywood was desolate and dark. \u201cStar Wars\u201d is the film that\u2019s generally credited for remaking movie culture, but it was actually \u201cRocky,\u201d with its new-style old-school optimism, that did that. More than any other film, it kicked open the door to the Reagan revolution by rekindling our primal need for happy endings. Stallone played Rocky. But he really played all of our desire to return to belief. Wherever that might lead.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a biographical drama to work, it\u2019s not required that the central actor do a pinpoint uncanny, so-close-to-…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623118,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[264608,93,131645,61,60,32379,270,233325,6883,1745],"class_list":["post-623117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-anthony-ippolito","tag-entertainment","tag-i-play-rocky","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-matt-dillon","tag-movies","tag-peter-farrelly","tag-sylvester-stallone","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}