TIFF ‘I Play Rocky’ Review: Anthony Ippolito Is the Breakout of the Year

Peter Farrelly’s account of how a broke Sylvester Stallone refused to sell his script had a TIFF audience on its feet, and it earns every bit of it.

I Play Rocky is the rare movie that knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologize for a second of it. Peter Farrelly’s account of how a broke, unproven Sylvester Stallone talked Hollywood into letting him star in his own screenplay has no formal ambition to speak of, and it is sentimental in ways that would be embarrassing if they were not so completely sincere. It will not change how you think about cinema.

It also had a packed house at the Princess of Wales standing and cheering, and I am not going to pretend that doesn’t count for something.

The premise is the stuff of industry legend. In 1975, Stallone was a struggling actor working dead-end jobs and auditioning for the same thankless parts as thugs and cops. Then he wrote a boxing script in three and a half days, producers wanted it badly, and he attached one condition that made no sense for a man in his position: he would only sell it if he could play the lead.

Anthony Ippolito plays Sylvester Stallone, then going by Mike, and the performance is the reason the whole thing works. Ippolito got this part by hearing about the project before casting began, shooting three scenes himself in his grandmother’s basement, and sending in the tape. Peter Farrelly watched it and called off the search. Knowing that going in, you expect a stunt. What you get is genuinely disciplined work.

The trap with playing Stallone is obvious. The voice and the physicality are so imitable that a thousand people have done the impression badly, and the trailer for this film got picked apart online back in July for exactly that reason. Ippolito sidesteps it by playing a man who has not become Sylvester Stallone yet.

The slurred diction is there, the hangdog posture, the heaviness in the shoulders. But there is no swagger, because the swagger had not been earned. What he gives you instead is hunger, and a very specific kind of pride that has nowhere to go.

Watch him in the audition scenes, reading for thugs and cops, fourth guy from the left. He is good in the room. Nobody cares. That is the whole film in miniature.

Peter Gamble’s screenplay traces the years before Rocky with more patience than I expected. Stallone is working dead-end jobs in New York, taking tickets at a movie theater where a box office cashier named Sasha catches his eye. AnnaSophia Robb plays her, and she is terrific, refusing the supportive-wife role the material keeps offering her.

Robb’s Sasha is opinionated, funny and frequently the smartest person in the scene. She is the one who first suspects the producers are trying to break her husband physically so they can replace him.

The film handles Stallone’s genuinely difficult early years with a light touch, including a softcore film he took out of pure economic desperation after being evicted. Some will find that treatment sanitized. I thought it was decent. There is a difference between airbrushing someone’s history and declining to be lurid about the worst week of their life.

The story really ignites once he writes the thing.

Inspired by watching Muhammad Ali fight Chuck Wepner for fifteen rounds, Stallone goes home and produces the Rocky screenplay in three and a half days.

Producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, played with real comic chemistry by P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell, read it and want it immediately. They start floating names. Charles Bronson. Burt Reynolds. Clint Eastwood.

And Stallone, who has no money, no leverage and no career, says the line the movie is named after.

The negotiation that follows is the best sustained stretch in the film. The offer climbs to $360,000, an enormous figure for a first-time screenwriter in 1975, and he keeps saying no. Tracy Letts turns up as a composite studio executive and is predictably excellent, playing the kind of man who has never once had to raise his voice to get his way.

The producers eventually find their loophole: halve the budget to a million dollars, which gives them freedom to cast whoever they want, but leaves a schedule so brutal that any overrun means Stallone can be fired on the spot.

That is the real fight in this movie, and Farrelly stages it well. Six hours of boxing training a day. Twenty miles of running on the first day of location work in Philadelphia. A pulled tendon and a doctor ordering two weeks off his feet, which he cannot take, because taking it would end everything.

The recreations of Rocky itself are hit and miss. The museum steps, the frozen sides of beef, the ice rink scene with Talia Shire, they are staged with obvious reverence and vary in how well they land. Some play as karaoke.

However, there is a sequence where Stallone steps away from a scene that isn’t working with Burgess Meredith, disappears for five minutes, and comes back having rewritten it on the fly into something that actually plays. That moment is better than any of the recreations, because it is about the thing the movie is actually interested in: a person discovering they are good at something nobody has given them permission to do.

Jay Duplass plays John G. Avildsen with a nice impish energy, a director who visibly gets sharper under pressure. Stephan James makes a hell of an entrance as Carl Weathers, walking into his audition already carrying himself like Apollo Creed. Matt Dillon is quietly devastating as Stallone’s verbally abusive father, a failed actor who became a hairdresser and never forgave anyone for it. Kiki Seto plays Talia Shire, Robert Morgan plays Burgess Meredith.

Is any of this artful?

No. Farrelly is a populist and has never pretended otherwise. Green Book won Best Picture eight years ago by offering audiences a comfortable version of a difficult subject, and this film operates on similar instincts. The canonization of Stallone here is shameless. The emotional beats arrive precisely on schedule. There is not a single moment of formal risk in the entire two hours and eight minutes.

And yet.

When the film reaches the Rocky premiere, and the audience inside the movie rises to its feet, the audience in my theater did the same. I have been to a lot of festival screenings. That does not happen often, and it does not happen by accident. Something in this film connects to a thing people badly want to believe right now, which is that stubbornness in the face of overwhelming evidence occasionally pays off.

Bill Conti’s theme is deployed exactly once, at exactly the right moment, and it works exactly as intended. I am not made of stone.

I Play Rocky borrows most of its emotional power from the film it is about, and it knows it. It is not trying to improve on Rocky. It is trying to explain why Rocky happened, and the answer it lands on is that one broke, unproven guy refused to take $360,000 to walk away from himself.

That is a real story, and Ippolito makes you feel every closed door on the way to it. A star just got made in Toronto. Whatever the Academy makes of the film around him, that part is not in question.

Rating: ★★★★½

That’s A Wrap | I Play Rocky

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CREDITS
Festival Premiere: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations)
Release Date: November 6, 2026 (limited), November 20 (wide)
Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios
Director: Peter Farrelly
Screenwriter: Peter Gamble
Cast: Anthony Ippolito, AnnaSophia Robb, Toby Kebbell, P.J. Byrne, Jay Duplass, Matt Dillon, Stephan James, Tracy Letts, Kiki Seto, Erik Palladino, Robert Morgan
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours 8 minutes

Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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