The useful fact about the proposition in I Play Rocky is that it gives almost everyone in the room a reasonable reason to turn it down. A little-known actor has written a screenplay people want. He insists on occupying the role they believe a name should play. The people trying to make the film can see the potential in the script and the cost of entrusting it to him. Peter Farrelly’s picture gets its most appealing tension from that distance. Knowing the deal went through does very little to explain what it would have been like to hear the condition when the actor had given people so few reasons to accept it.
Anthony Ippolito has to give the young Sylvester Stallone a voice and a posture that carry recognizable information without letting familiarity settle every encounter. He is particularly engaging when the recognizable mannerisms seem like resources a man has to use to get through a room. An impression can be reassuring because the audience already knows who it is seeing. A performance about an aspiring actor has to give somebody the chance to look unpromising. Ippolito can make the character’s refusal to separate himself from the part sound both persuasive and a little difficult to live with.
P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell, playing producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, are important because they can give the negotiations a practical difficulty. A producer can see an advantage in having an unusual story to sell and still have to imagine how a person who has never heard of Stallone will react to it. The meetings have more force when the film allows that calculation to sound persuasive. An audience’s foreknowledge makes every objection seem briefly foolish. The actors can restore the time in which the objections were part of the work that had to be done to make the film possible.
AnnaSophia Robb’s Sasha gives the question a life outside the room where a film can be financed. Turning down a deal sounds noble in the few seconds it takes to describe. It takes much longer to share the conditions under which somebody has decided to do it. The film earns some of its affection for Stallone when the decision has a cost visible to a person who has heard him explain it before. A broader interest in the work of living with a person who believes so emphatically in his own necessity would make the stakes less predictable.
Once the film moves into the making of Rocky, there is recognizable pleasure in watching a work assembled out of limited time and money. A shot or a location has a different value to people trying to get it before the opportunity disappears. Farrelly’s generous instinct can give those workers a place in the story. The nostalgia is less rewarding when familiarity with the finished picture is asked to do the emotional work. A decision about how to get a scene can be interesting before it has acquired the glow of being a decision about an image everybody knows.
The later emphasis on finding the familiar image again can flatten a rather appealing distinction between making a small movie and setting out to make a classic. On an affordable production there is some freedom in having to use whatever shows up. A location may work for reasons nobody would have thought to put in a proposal. It is a way of making the picture that deserves to feel precarious even after the financing has been found. Farrelly gets closer to that uncertainty when there is a little room for something to go wrong on a day the audience recognizes as part of the legend.
The modesty of the film’s chosen piece of history is one of its strengths. It has a person making a set of arguments in rooms he is lucky to enter. It takes more effort to keep that situation open than to move it toward an inevitable ovation. The best parts leave an actor momentarily dependent on what somebody else sees in him. The rest knows the outcome a little too well.
