Anthony Ippolito, who plays Sylvester Stallone in “I Play Rocky,” 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 — that sort of peach-ivory pallor. And Ippolito’s impersonation of Stallone’s 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’s truly playing Stallone — the sweetly stubborn and dogged person he was at the time.
The story told by “I Play Rocky” isn’t 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’s not going anywhere. All he gets offered are roles like “Thug #2” (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’s so down-and-out he’s reduced to trying out for a soft-core porn film (Stallone was actually in one, though that was back in 1970).
For a while, “I Play Rocky” is a high comedy of negotiation, as Winkler and Chartoff, who have secured a relatively low budget of $2 million to make “Rocky,” 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’s need to play Rocky is non-negotiable, and the essence of that whim of iron is that it’s the true-life version of Rocky Balboa’s need to be a contender. The pleasure of “I Play Rocky” is that it understands the karmic way in which the story of “Rocky” — the underdog who triumphs against all odds — was echoed in the saga of how Stallone got the movie off the ground.
But that’s where the story becomes rich. Stallone has Winkler and Chartoff over a barrel; they can’t make the movie without him. And so, worn down at last, they agree to let him star in “Rocky,” 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 “Rocky” turned into a great movie.
