I Play Rocky traces how Sylvester Stallone's broke, unknown years led to the 1976 Rocky

A film about the making of Rocky

Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky follows Sylvester Stallone from hard-scrabbling anonymity in New York to the first flush of success with the 1976 film he wrote and starred in. Farrelly, who directed Green Book, casts Anthony Ippolito as the young Stallone. The New York Times describes the movie as a light, fizzy entertainment that treats its hero's rise like a Disney-style fairy tale. The Guardian's review of a 50th-anniversary reissue of the original Rocky calls it a forthright and rousingly idealistic film that drops the gloom of earlier boxing movies.

Years of struggle before the script

The story starts with a broke Stallone living on the streets of New York in the early 1970s, with only his dog Butkus for company, according to the BBC. Between auditions he works long hours gutting fish, and he has partial face paralysis and a speech impediment after being delivered by forceps at birth. In Los Angeles he was so poor that he had to sell Butkus, who later gets a role in the film. The New York Times places him alongside his girlfriend Sasha Czack, played by AnnaSophia Robb, whom he meets while they both work at the same movie theater.

Writing Rocky and refusing to sell it

The BBC reports that Stallone drafted the story of Rocky in three days. RTBF says a studio offered large sums for the script, but Stallone refused to sell it unless he could play Rocky himself. Nick de Semlyen, editor of Empire magazine, argues that the actor embodied the underdog he created.

“Stallone is the personification of an underdog himself.”

De Semlyen adds that it is hard to name another reversal of fortune in film history as dramatic as Stallone's move from being broke to Hollywood's hottest name.

Casting and the 1976 result

Producer Michele Weiss told a press conference that one of Stallone's few suggestions was to cast a lesser-known actor, according to RTBF. The team considered a worldwide casting search before Ippolito, 27, impressed them with an audition that caught the gestures and build of the action star. Ippolito, who played a young Al Pacino in The Offer, sees strong parallels between himself and the role.

“Of course there are differences, because Stallone was and is a very talented writer.”

Rocky became the biggest box-office hit of 1976 and won best picture at the 1977 Oscars, the BBC reports, and RTBF counts three Oscars in total for the film.

Reception and the memoir

The New York Times notes that the film leaves out Stallone's mother and softens his father, Frank, played by Matt Dillon, whereas Stallone's own account of his parents in his recent memoir The Steps is far tougher. The Financial Times calls the movie a feelgood film that plays like a near remake of the classic it depicts, and says the section about actually making Rocky feels like a postscript. The Guardian's reissue review describes the 1976 film as wholesome in its patriotism and as a love letter to Philadelphia. The BBC notes that The Steps describes how the inspiration for Rocky took hold in Stallone's own struggles to make it as an actor.