There's a specific pleasure in watching a myth get made in real time, and I Play Rocky delivers it with unusual efficiency. Peter Farrelly — the director best known for There's Something About Mary and the Oscar-winning Green Book — strips the story of Rocky's creation down to its chassis: a broke, unproven Italian-American with a gift for self-belief and a screenplay nobody wanted to let him star in. The result is less a prestige biopic than a comedy with historical footnotes, moving at a clip that feels almost metabolically different from the brooding social-realist original. The film's core argument is quietly provocative: Stallone's story is more mythically satisfying than Rocky Balboa's. The fictional boxer goes the distance and loses on points; the real man went the distance and won the whole thing. I Play Rocky knows this and leans into the irony, framing Stallone's holding-out against studio pressure as the more dramatic sporting contest of the two. PJ Byrne and Toby Kebbell as producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff provide the exasperated institutional resistance that every underdog story needs, and the film is shrewd enough to draw a direct line from The Godfather's commercial revival of the ethnic working-class epic to Rocky's possibility — a lineage the film earns rather than merely asserts. Then there is Anthony Ippolito. The word 'eerie' is used in the review, and it's exactly right. This is not an impression in the Saturday Night Live sense — it's a full physical inhabitation, the same seductively slurred delivery, the same particular quality of warmth beneath the stubborn outer shell. What makes the performance remarkable is what Ippolito adds rather than just replicates: Stallone's disarming humor, his refusal to be patronized, the sweetness that the original films knew was there but rarely foregrounded. The fact that Ippolito previously pulled off young Al Pacino in The Offer (Paramount+, 2022) suggests a performer with an unusual gift for historical embodiment rather than a one-trick mimicry act. Farrelly's direction is the film's clearest formal gamble. He shoots a story about a slow, socially conscious 1970s boxing picture as though it were a screwball comedy — fast, light, almost giddy. This is a deliberately wrong-footing choice that happens to work. The Steadicam sequences, the guerrilla filmmaking, the labor-union workarounds: all of it gets the breathless treatment, which mirrors the energy of people making something too fast and too cheap and against too much resistance. Peter Gamble's screenplay earns its momentum even if Gamble himself, as the review notes with some dryness, earns no acting cameo for his trouble. The film has genuine gaps. Talia Shire's presence in both The Godfather and Rocky — the actual connective tissue between those two canonical films — goes unmentioned, which feels less like a choice and more like an omission. AnnaSophia Robb as Sasha Stallone and Stephan James as Carl Weathers are present and credible without being particularly illuminated. The film is interested in Stallone's story; everyone else is functional. That's a limitation, not a flaw that breaks the enterprise, but it means I Play Rocky is better as a crowd-pleasing sports movie about movie-making than as a genuinely textured portrait of a creative moment. The most useful comparison is The Offer, the Paramount+ series about The Godfather's production. That series had more runtime and more room for the institutional and personal pressures of its subject. I Play Rocky has better pacing and a narrower, punchier thesis. Both films are fundamentally about the gap between what studios think they want and what turns out to matter — and both hinge on a performer who disappears so completely into an iconic face that you stop cataloguing the tricks and start watching the person. Where The Offer sprawled, I Play Rocky sprints. Neither is definitive, but this one is more fun. The reviewer's closing observation — that Ippolito should next play William Golding, discovered by Faber executive Charles Monteith from the slush pile — is not idle whimsy. It identifies something real: a performer whose value is specifically in making historical male creative stubbornness legible and even lovable. Whether the industry has the imagination to use him that way remains, as of November 2024, an open question.
