Fifty years after Rocky hit screens in December 1975, Peter Farrelly has made a film about the film — and the meta-layers stack up fast. Rocky was an underdog story. Stallone getting to star in it was a second underdog story. Now Anthony Ippolito, a 27-year-old New York actor who sent unsolicited audition tapes into the void for years, has landed the role of Stallone himself in I Play Rocky and is being talked up for a best actor Oscar nomination. The franchise's gravitational pull, it turns out, extends to the people who make movies about it. Ippolito is a strange fit on paper. Talking to him over video call from Rome, the resemblance to Rocky-era Stallone isn't obvious — softer features, higher voice, more young Pacino than young Sly. He's actually already played Pacino, in The Offer, the TV series about The Godfather's troubled production. But the moment I Play Rocky starts, Ippolito drops an octave, adopts Stallone's sinus-heavy delivery, juts his chin, rounds his shoulders and moves in that loping shuffle. He bulked up through what he describes as an entire lifestyle shift — a lot of eating, a lot of protein. The physical transformation is real. So is the risk of doing it at all, given that Stallone's drooping features and slurred speech are the result of a forceps injury at birth, not a character choice. Punch that wrong and the film becomes a cruelty reel. Ippolito doesn't punch it wrong. Farrelly's film covers the period when Stallone was at his lowest: working in a fishmonger's, appearing in an adult movie to cover rent, picking up bit parts as thugs and cops, being routinely belittled for his speech and looks, especially by a domineering father played by Matt Dillon. What the film is ultimately about is the incongruence Ippolito identifies: people read Stallone as just a strong, burly guy with a slur, and then found out he was a brilliant writer. His Rocky co-star Burt Young reportedly called him 'an orphan in life' with 'a big fire burning and no place to put it.' That is the engine the film runs on. The most entertaining section arrives before Rocky is greenlit, when producers try every combination of money to get Stallone to give up the title role. The studio offers keep growing — $300,000 at peak, worth close to $2 million today — while Stallone, with a heavily pregnant wife and no career prospects, keeps saying no. At one point he sells his own dog to make ends meet. Farrelly plays this as near-comedy, the seat-of-its-pants energy of a man too naive about the rules of Hollywood to understand why he should break. Ippolito, asked whether he'd have held out that long, laughs and admits he genuinely doesn't know. That honesty lands better than the inspirational alternative would have. Farrelly also has real fun with the chaos of the original shoot: scenes rattled off in single frenzied takes, Stallone limping through filming with a strained leg tendon then a broken hand from punching a frozen side of beef in the famous meat-locker scene, an entire cast and crew squeezing into a walk-in freezer to hide from a union rep threatening to pull the filming permit. The film isn't especially interested in Stallone's inner life — it's a comedy caper with inspirational scaffolding, not a psychological portrait — and Farrelly seems to know this is a feature, not a bug. Crowds have responded accordingly. For Ippolito, the trajectory is its own version of the story he's playing. A baseball pitching prodigy at age three — appearing on Ripley's Believe It or Not — who carried the sport into college before turning seriously to acting in his late teens. Walk-on parts in Not Fade Away, The English Teacher, Pixels. A main role in Netflix's Grand Army. Then Pacino in The Offer. Now Stallone in I Play Rocky, with awards season speculation following him to hotel rooms in Rome. He met Andrew Garfield recently and, his words, is still recovering. The names are getting bigger. He recently stopped being one of them. Whether the film itself holds beyond awards season is the real question. It's well-made, genuinely funny in places, and built around a performance that earns its central conceit. But inspirational making-of movies are a specific subgenre with a short shelf life — Ed Wood is the exception, not the rule — and I Play Rocky's decision to play Stallone's story as uplift rather than complexity may mean it ages less well than its subject. For now, it works. The underdog structure is, apparently, inexhaustible.
