Contenders: "I Play Rocky"

Not so much triumph of the underdog as history rewritten by the victors, I Play Rocky returns us to the formative days of one Sylvester Stallone, when he was just a hopeful with a speech impediment, pounding the New York streets in a succession of odd jobs: fishmonger, ticket-tearer, valet, softcore porn star. Above all else, it's yet another of Hollywood's recent legacy projects, greenlit because a) there's IP money on the table, b) there's something worth commemorating (whether fifty years since Rocky, itself returned to cinemas this weekend, or the publication of Stallone's memoir The Steps) and c) some sharp-eyed casting director has found a dead ringer for the film's subject. Here, it's newcomer Anthony Ippolito, giving an uncannily accurate impersonation of Sly in the first phase of his career, all swelling muscles, mumbled consonants and shrugging bearing. One early victory for Ippolito is that he reminds you the original Rocky Balboa was a street stray, a wounded animal: not so much a Raging Bull as a dumb mutt, kicked around from pillar to post. (It took a pet shop gal to take care of him.) The doggedness with which this fictionalised Stallone refuses to take the money to step away from his self-penned Rocky script feels believable enough: he's like a mastiff with a shiny new chew toy his handlers can't prise from his jaws. But I Play Rocky isn't shy about introducing notes of good old Hollywood bullshit, either. Early on, the film suggests Stallone was cast in softcore for the size of his package, which anybody who's ever witnessed 1970's The Party at Kitty and Stud's - retitled and rereleased as The Italian Stallion years later, in the wake of Rocky's success - will know simply isn't true. Still, the scene might be corralled into a useful working definition of contemporary star privilege: once you've made it, not only are you empowered to endlessly rehash and retcon your most enduring creations, you will also be afforded a movie about the making of your own making, which will insinuate to a captive global audience of millions that your dick is bigger than it actually is. Fame gives you inches; it turns a light-middleweight into a super-heavy.

If that seems at all crude, bear in mind that I Play Rocky is the handiwork of director Peter Farrelly, rejoined here on Oscar-baiting Green Book form rather than irreverent Stuck on You form. The script he's alighted on (by Peter Gamble) is Hollywood trad, never particularly backward about congratulating movieland for handing this scrapper a break in the first place; Farrelly locates within it the most basic movie building blocks, and constructs from them a movie that even the dumbest mutt could easily follow. We get an actual puppy named Butkus (another Dick joke); romance with usherette sweetheart Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb), who types up Stallone's scripts and gives him notes, and whose tears upon reading Rocky confirm that our guy is onto something; and plentiful homilies along the lines of "if you don't believe in yourself, who will?" Farrelly and Gamble's canniest move is to stress the struggle - showing this Sly having to put back groceries at the checkout and even sell the dog - in such a way that the eventual uplift will land all the more effectively with cinemagoers taking time out from their own cost-of-living crisis. It's corn, but it's good, hearty, satisfying corn, the kind of corn that wins you round and sends you home with a full belly, the kind of corn the American studios once reliably traded in, the kind of corn that rounds out a Best Picture longlist. Even in its nerdier second half - handed over to what seems like a Rocky Re-Enactment Society, for the benefit of the original's most obsessive fans - IPR gets a boost from having to re-engage with that rich strain of character acting that was Rocky's bedrock. There's fun stuff with Tracy Letts as United Artists' carnivore-capitalist production chief Sandy Maddox; Toby Kebbell and P.J. Byrne do a nice, light-comic double act as producers Chartoff and Winkler; Stephan James catches Carl Weathers' ebullience in passing; there's a very sweet cameo from Farrelly loyalist Matt Dillon as Stallone Sr.; and a final push to glory from Jay Duplass as a hyper John Avildsen. (Farrelly remains a generous director: everybody gets their flowers.) Anyone with any degree of media literacy will spot the tricks the film is playing, but also that they've been played well - and I think having fresh(ish) faces like Ippolito and Robb centre frame helps, too: these younger performers are having to sell this script's more idealistic schtick as if for the first time, with minimal cynicism, in the hope of making their own careers. (This was Rocky's trick, too, of course - though nobody thought to call it a trick at the time.) So it's not just Hollywood talking about itself, it's also Hollywood talking to itself, at a moment when its gatekeepers have rarely seemed so cowed and risk-averse. If the film it comes in appears somewhat safe - a foursquare box-office and awards contender - the message here is one about the risks and rewards of more adventurous creative thinking. Take a chance on someone, the movie urges. Take a chance on a longshot, even. You never know. You never know.

I Play Rocky is now previewing in selected cinemas; it opens nationwide on Wed 11.