Let’s set the scene: it’s the mid-1970s, a broke actor named Sylvester Stallone is subsisting on stubbornness and questionable audition choices, and he refuses to sell a screenplay unless he gets to star in it himself.
Everyone thinks he’s insane. Fifty years later, Hollywood has decided the making of that gamble deserves its own movie — and the internet has decided that the I Play Rocky Early Reviews cycle is one of the more entertaining critical pile-ons of the fall festival season.
Grab some raw eggs, because this one’s got a little bit of everything: uncanny impressions, “streaming-movie” side-eye, and a debate about whether the guy playing Stallone might actually be a better actor than Stallone.
Wait, What Is This Movie Again?
I Play Rocky is director Peter Farrelly’s dramedy about how Sylvester Stallone wrote, sold, and fought to star in Rocky — the scrappy 1976 underdog boxing movie that somehow became the top-grossing film of its year and an Oscar Best Picture winner.
Anthony Ippolito, who you might remember playing a young Al Pacino in The Offer, plays young Stallone, and based on the earliest wave of I Play Rocky Early Reviews, he was apparently born specifically for this assignment.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and per Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations), with a release date of Friday, Nov. 6. It comes from Amazon MGM Studios, and per the credits floating around, it stars Anthony Ippolito, AnnaSophia Robb, Toby Kebbell, P.J. Byrne, Jay Duplass, Matt Dillon, Stephan James, Tracy Letts, Kiki Seto, Erik Palladino, and Robert Morgan.
The Ippolito Effect: Critics Can’t Stop Talking About the Face
If there’s one thing every single I Play Rocky Early Reviews roundup agrees on, it’s this: Anthony Ippolito did something to his face and voice that critics are still recovering from.
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman basically wrote a love letter to Ippolito’s bone structure, noting that Ippolito looks startlingly like Stallone — the droopy dark eyes, the slightly jutting lips with the delicate dip at the center, even the peach-ivory skin tone.
And it’s not just the look — Gleiberman adds that Ippolito’s impersonation of Stallone’s voice is a miraculous act of channeling, capturing that super-low back-of-the-throat growl and mush-mouthed, molasses-slow intonation.
Reading enough of the I Play Rocky Early Reviews batch, you start to notice that critics ran out of new ways to say “he sounds exactly like him” by about the third paragraph of every piece.
Over at JoBlo, the review admits going in skeptical — early CinemaCon footage had the critic worried the big-screen Stallone would tip into caricature — before doing a full 180 and calling the finished film a knockout and easily Peter Farrelly’s greatest film, “helped” enormously by Ippolito being uncanny as Stallone.
The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney went so far as to suggest Ippolito’s audition alone sealed the deal, noting that Ippolito had heard about the project before casting even began and sent in a self-taped audition that convinced the filmmakers they’d found their guy — a decision Rooney says was unquestionably right, potentially sparking debate over whether Ippolito is a better actor than Stallone himself.
Which, considering Stallone’s filmography includes a movie literally titled Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, is not exactly a high bar, but still — bold praise for a guy whose big break was playing another legendary actor two years ago.
Rotten Tomatoes’ official first-reviews roundup collected the loudest superlatives in one place, including calls that Ippolito is a revelation in a performance that will be remembered for quite some time, that the movie could do for Ippolito’s career what Rocky did for Stallone, and the somewhat ominous but affectionate warning that you may get sick of hearing that Ippolito gives a star-making performance, but it’s undeniably true.
Also Read: I Play Rocky Trailer: Anthony Ippolito Brings The Legendary Sylvester Stallone Origin Story To Life!
Honestly, at this point in the I Play Rocky Early Reviews cycle, “star-making performance” should just get its own font.
Even Rotten Tomatoes’ aggregated critic pull-quotes lean the same direction, describing Ippolito’s work as the kind of uncanny transformation that occasionally makes you forget you’re watching an actor playing Stallone rather than Stallone himself, and framing the larger film as one that goes the distance by turning Sylvester Stallone’s journey into its own rousing underdog story.
But Not Everyone’s Throwing Roses — The Movie Itself Is Getting Jabbed
Here’s where the I Play Rocky Early Reviews narrative gets its plot twist: loving the lead actor and loving the movie built around him turned out to be two very different things.
Slant Magazine landed some of the harshest jabs, arguing that despite Ippolito offering a killer impersonation that could fool you from certain angles into thinking you’re watching the real deal, the film’s disinterest in digging beneath Stallone’s public image means Ippolito’s performance ultimately amounts to little more than a party trick.
Slant goes further, calling out the irony that the film keeps insisting on capturing something “real” while exposing its own phoniness and its desperation to ride the coattails of the original 1976 classic.
Rotten Tomatoes’ own critic-quote grab bag doesn’t shy away from the split verdict either, tossing in lines like “there’s nothing visually exceptional happening here; I Play Rocky often has a streaming-movie feel” from The Film Stage, and a dig at the cinematography describing the flat, overlit televisual sheen of the film’s recreation of ’70s Philly as blandly artificial. Somewhere, a Philadelphia tourism board is quietly wincing.
According to ComingSoon’s summary of the reaction, the film landed at a 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes after its festival debut, with Vulture’s Alison Willmore acknowledging the movie’s endearing qualities while flagging its syrupy tendencies, and observing that Ippolito doesn’t play Stallone much differently than he might play Rocky himself.
Meanwhile TheWrap’s Chase Hutchinson felt the narrative lacked genuine passion and heart, while on the flip side Awards Buzz’s Scott Menzel called it one of the year’s best films. Somewhere between those two takes is presumably the actual movie.
That same piece notes The New York Post’s Johnny Oleksinski called the film stirring, inspiring, and surprisingly hilarious, comparing Ippolito’s initial screen presence to Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown — proof that “young unknown transforms into beloved cultural icon onscreen” has officially become its own micro-genre of biopic, and critics have run out of ways to describe it that don’t involve name-dropping another biopic.
The One Thing Everyone Agrees On (Besides the Face)
Scroll through enough of the I Play Rocky Early Reviews and a funny pattern emerges: nobody, not even the harshest critics, is willing to throw a real punch at Ippolito personally. Even Cinemablend’s rundown of the Toronto reactions leans almost entirely on praising the performance, noting that Ippolito is “truly playing Stallone” — the sweetly stubborn and dogged person he was at the time, and that the element holding the movie together is Ippolito, who nails the garbled, rumbling diction, hangdog expression, and hulking physicality of Stallone while never losing sight of his insecurities at this unproven point in his career.
That piece also cites Rooney’s take that the film is sure to strike a chord with anyone with a nostalgic love for Rocky, recreating the movie’s most iconic moments with reverential respect — even while conceding some scenes work better than others, with Ippolito’s performance overriding most complaints.
So here’s the verdict, if you’re trying to speed-run the entire I Play Rocky Early Reviews discourse: the movie itself is a decent-to-divisive underdog biopic that occasionally looks like it was shot for a Tuesday-night streaming slot, but Anthony Ippolito’s Stallone impression is so committed, so uncanny, and so weirdly moving that it’s carrying the whole production on its back — much like a certain fictional boxer once carried an entire genre of sports movie into the cultural stratosphere.
Whether I Play Rocky ends up being remembered as a great film or simply “the movie where that guy nailed the Stallone voice” is a fight that’ll go the full twelve rounds once it hits theaters on November 6.
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