Name: I Play Rocky
Genre: Drama, History
Released: 2026-11-06T00:00:00+00:00
Cast: Anthony Ippolito, AnnaSophia Robb, Matt Dillon, P.J. Byrne, Toby Kebbell

The still Amazon MGM Studios chose to sell I Play Rocky contains almost nothing new. A grey sweatshirt, worn and stained. A black knit cap. Hands wrapped in tape, raised above the head. Behind them, an overcast sky and the clock tower of Philadelphia City Hall. Every piece of it belongs to Rocky, and the man wearing it is not Sylvester Stallone but Anthony Ippolito, playing him.

That is the whole proposition of Peter Farrelly’s film. I Play Rocky is a biographical drama about how an unknown actor wrote Rocky and refused to sell the script unless he could play the lead, and it is built, by necessity, out of an image its audience already owns. The film widens across American theaters this month, and the reviews from its festival run have split along one line: whether a careful copy of a famous film can hold a look, and a meaning, of its own.

A resemblance made by an actor, not by software

The casting is the film’s first design decision. Ippolito, who played a young Al Pacino in The Offer, the miniseries about the making of The Godfather, was never asked to audition. He told the Associated Press that he decided to “make some stuff on my own and kind of send it to them unsolicited.” Farrelly says the tape ended the search before it started: “We were going to do a worldwide search, we never did it.” What convinced him was a distinction. Ippolito, he said, “didn’t do a caricature of Stallone or Rocky and he knew the difference.”

That distinction carries more weight here than in most biopics, because the face on screen has to sit beside a face every viewer can already picture. Ippolito described the job as needing “to strip away the celebrity.” AnnaSophia Robb, who plays Stallone’s first wife, Sasha Czack, told the AP he had spent “like a year and a half of just getting into this role.” In Slashfilm, Bill Bria called the result “Exhibit A against Hollywood’s lust for digital de-aging and necromancy.” Read as design, that is the film’s strongest argument: a likeness built by an actor rather than by software.

A making-of told through its machinery

Farrelly made his name on broad comedies with his brother Bobby before Green Book took him to the Academy Awards, and I Play Rocky belongs to that second mode, a true story pitched at a wide audience. The script, by Peter Gamble, is largely a story of production logistics. In Variety’s account, the producers set the shoot in Philadelphia “so that they can shoot it without unions,” use “the newly developed Steadicam to glide up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum,” and send Stallone into meat lockers to punch frozen slabs. The Film Stage notes that it is the first film in which an actor plays the Steadicam’s inventor, Garrett Brown.

This is the most interesting material in the project, because it treats the look of Rocky as a product of its limits: little money, real streets, a new camera rig. Variety describes Stallone rejecting a veteran boxing choreographer because, in his view, the fights in that man’s films all looked the same, and working out the punches himself with Carl Weathers, played here by Stephan James. Sound follows the same logic of period and replacement. The score is by Dave Palmer, sitting beside several new songs by Andrew Bird, and Bria singles out the film’s “period ’70s needle drops.”

Where the copy goes flat

The objections arrive at exactly this point. Writing for TheWrap, Chase Hutchinson called the film a “simulacrum,” “flatly shot without any visual texture, save for when it tries to emulate the look of the classic film.” If that is right, the only images with character in I Play Rocky are borrowed ones. Bria, who liked the lead performance, found that the recreations of Rocky scenes “feel more akin to fan service than vital drama,” and that the Andrew Bird songs, placed over the tender scenes between Stallone and Sasha, turn “jarringly treacly.”

Owen Gleiberman, who praised the film in Variety as a “cleverly crafted crowd-pleaser,” names a larger gap. The film, he wrote, takes for granted and never quite dramatises how Rocky, “a Frank Capra fable dusted in ’70s grit,” changed America. Its studio antagonist, Tracy Letts’s Sandy Maddox, is a fictional composite of several executives. And the man at the centre stands outside the project: the AP reports Stallone was uninvolved beyond a conversation with Farrelly, and he is publishing his own memoir, The Steps. His verdict on the film was generous and dry. “It’s fantastic. And the kid did a great job,” he told the AP. “This is so odd. They usually do this when you’re dead and gone.”

The cast, and where it opens

Matt Dillon plays Stallone’s father, Frank Stallone Sr. P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell play the producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, Jay Duplass plays the director John G. Avildsen, Kiki Seto plays Talia Shire and Robert Morgan plays Burgess Meredith. Toby Emmerich, Christian Baha and Farrelly produced. The film runs just over two hours, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and held its Philadelphia premiere at the Philadelphia Film Society on November 2.

Anthony Ippolito as Sylvester Stallone in I Play Rocky from 2026 — Anthony Ippolito as Sylvester Stallone in *I Play Rocky* (2026)

Amazon MGM Studios opened I Play Rocky in select US theaters on November 6 and takes it nationwide on November 20, after returning the original Rocky to theaters from November 7 to 11 for its 50th anniversary. It has played in the UK and Ireland since November 6 through Entertainment Film Distributors. The international rollout continues in Mexico on November 12, India on November 13, Brazil on November 19, Germany on November 26, France on December 23 and Spain on January 22, 2027.

The film can rebuild the cap, the tape and the sky over Philadelphia. The raised arms still belong to the earlier film, and each review so far has measured how close the copy comes to them.