The secret screening reveals its contender
Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky was revealed as the BFI London Film Festival's surprise film on October 16. Farrelly joined festival director Kristy Matheson at the Royal Festival Hall to introduce the drama, in which Anthony Ippolito plays the young Sylvester Stallone during the making of Rocky. The Hollywood Reporter's account also records Farrelly explaining how Ippolito's homemade audition tape effectively ended the search for his lead.
The choice creates an amusing reversal. A festival audience buys a ticket without knowing the film; the film itself tells a story whose broad outcome almost everybody knows. Stallone will become Stallone. Rocky will reach the screen. The challenge is to make the uncertain stages of that journey matter even when the destination has its own theme music.
The actor behind the familiar silhouette
A young actor playing a young star has two jobs that can easily conflict. He must establish recognition, then stop depending on it. Stallone's voice and physical bearing are unusually identifiable. Reproducing them can secure a few seconds of audience delight. Building a person around them requires something less demonstrative: the sense that this body and voice belong to someone who does not yet know they will become famous.
Farrelly's account of the audition is relevant because it describes a performer making a case for himself through material rather than reputation. According to the director, Ippolito filmed scenes in his grandmother's basement. That is an appealing parallel with the movie's subject. It should also remain a casting anecdote, rather than a substitute for evaluating the performance.
The useful standard is whether the impression leaves room for embarrassment, hesitation and ordinary behavior. If every movement anticipates the icon, the character can never be genuinely uncertain. A story about an unproven actor needs moments when being that actor is awkward, inconvenient or unpersuasive. Otherwise Hollywood's discovery of him starts to look inevitable. Inevitability is a fairly poor sparring partner.
Hollywood's favorite underdog can become a machine
Farrelly described Peter Gamble's screenplay as a story that mirrors Rocky. The attraction is clear: the struggle to make an underdog film becomes another underdog film. That symmetry can supply a strong structure. It can also flatten the people and institutions around its hero into a succession of obstacles arranged for our applause.
Ed Wood offers a useful alternative model. Its affection for its filmmaker does not require his work to become conventionally accomplished. The relationships and the act of making something provide the emotional stakes. Dolemite Is My Name similarly makes collective ingenuity part of its appeal. The pleasure comes from people solving practical problems together, rather than waiting for the industry to announce that their central figure was right all along.
For I Play Rocky, that suggests a productive emphasis: the making should be as interesting as the eventual vindication. A disagreement over money, casting or a scene can reveal competing ideas of what a film is supposed to do. Reduce every disagreement to short-sighted executives resisting genius and the drama loses the particular texture of filmmaking. The audience already knows which side history applauded.
Let the new film earn its own emotional finish
Rocky's endurance also complicates the use of its most familiar images and music. Recognition can create a powerful surge of feeling. But a making-of film must decide how much of that feeling it has built itself. A recognizable cue can complete an emotional pattern or simply borrow one. The difference lies in whether the preceding scenes have given the new characters independent weight.
That is why the quieter parts of this premise may be more revealing than the recreated triumphs. How does an unproven writer defend an idea without sounding absurd? What does loyalty cost before a project becomes a success? Who does the unglamorous work that later disappears from the legend? Those questions can make a familiar origin story feel inhabited.
London's surprise slot gives I Play Rocky a useful frame: an audience encountering a film together rather than a collection of isolated impersonation clips. The next test belongs to the drama. If it can make the process compelling before the famous outcome arrives, it will have found something worth adding to Rocky's mythology. The original has already handled the inspirational montage rather well.