Few Hollywood origin stories have the neat symmetry of Sylvester Stallone’s. Before Rocky became a cultural heavyweight, its creator was a struggling actor betting almost everything on a script about a struggling boxer. Today, Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky goes back to that precarious stretch of Stallone’s life, turning the making of the 1976 classic into its own underdog story; one that has landed with a whopping 80% on the Tomatometer.

With Anthony Ippolito stepping into Stallone’s shoes, the film arrives with plenty of history to live up to — and its first critical bell has already rung. 

I Play Rocky currently holds an 80% Tomatometer score from 35 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, giving Peter Farrelly’s biopic a sturdy early position ahead of its November theatrical release.

The early reactions are notably split between admiration for the film’s crowd-pleasing energy and reservations about its storytelling. Critics have repeatedly singled out Anthony Ippolito, with reviews describing his performance as magnetic and praising his ability to capture the younger Stallone. Others have found the film sentimental or too familiar in its approach to the Hollywood underdog formula.

That divide gives the score some useful context. I Play Rocky is not being treated as a radical reinvention of the biopic; its appeal, for many critics, lies in watching the story behind a movie that already knows how to make an audience root for the underdog.

Some reviews have even compared its uplifting effect to the original Rocky, while others argue that Farrelly leans too heavily on nostalgia, giving some form to the film before its limited theatrical release on November 13, 2026.

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Long before Rocky Balboa entered Philadelphia’s boxing ring, Stallone was fighting a very different battle: one involving Hollywood doors that kept refusing to open.

I Play Rocky focuses on the development and production of Rocky, following Sylvester Stallone as he attempts to get his screenplay made while insisting that he play the title character himself. The story captures the period when he was still an unknown actor, rather than the global star audiences would eventually associate with the name.

That distinction is central to this particular biopic. The film is not another chapter in Rocky Balboa’s fictional career; it is about the man who created him and the increasingly unlikely path that carried his script from an ambitious idea to a movie that would become a cultural phenomenon.

With Anthony Ippolito portraying Stallone, the film also folds several real figures from that chapter into its story, including Carl Weathers, Sasha Czack, Frank Stallone Sr., Irwin Winkler, Robert Chartoff and John G. Avildsen. In other words, the punchline is already known. Rocky became Rocky. What I Play Rocky asks audiences to revisit is everything that had to go right before anyone knew that would happen.

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Does I Play Rocky's whopping RT scores excite? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.