‘i Play Rocky’ Finds New Inspiration In An Old Story

Rocky debuted in theaters 50 years ago, in 1976—a bicentennial-year release that underscored the movie’s profound American spirit. Immediately a blockbuster and critical darling (the highest-grossing movie of 1976 and winner of the Best Picture Oscar), it has since become a pantheon film in American cinema. Rocky’s Philadelphia setting and underdog, rags-to-riches story captured a hardscrabble American optimism, something that gave needed inspiration in the mid-1970s and resonates still today.

Now in 2026—America’s semiquincentennial—Rocky is getting a theatrical rerelease. And a new movie, I Play Rocky (out today in select theaters) is telling the story of the iconic movie’s development, which is an underdog epic of its own.

The movie, directed by Peter Farrelly (Green Book) and starring Anthony Ippolito in a breakout turn as Sylvester Stallone, is a refreshingly feel-good crowd pleaser. It’s the sort of well-made, intelligent, but also inspiring movie for grown-ups that feels like a dying breed in Hollywood.

Movies About Moviemaking

I Play Rocky (rated PG-13 for language) follows a well-worn template of a movie about the making of a classic movie. Saving Mr. Banks (2013) was about Walt Disney and the making of Mary Poppins. Hitchcock (2012) was about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho. Last year’s Nouvelle Vague was about Jean-Luc Godard and the making of Breathless. I Play Rocky is about Stallone and the making of Rocky.

Hollywood loves making movies about itself: stories about storytelling, movies about moviemaking, actors playing actors.

Hollywood loves making movies about itself: stories about storytelling, movies about moviemaking, actors playing actors.

Self-reflexive inspiration goes back more than a century in cinema, perhaps starting with Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). The 1950s produced classics like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952), but the trend really picked up in the postmodern era in the 1960s and beyond: 8 ½ (1963), Day for Night (1973), Mulholland Drive (2001), Adaptation (2002), The Artist (2011), and Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood (2019). The list is long. A hallmark of postmodernity is a metaposture of knowing awareness—storytellers who know they’re storytellers and want the audience to know that they know.

As postmodernism has given way to metamodernism, the trend of “movies about moviemaking” has continued, but in a slightly different register. These sorts of films are no longer merely metaexercises in self-awareness. The cerebral, cynical detachment of “films about filmmaking” like Barton Fink (1991), Ed Wood (1994), or even Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) has given way to metamodern expressions that blend cynicism and sincerity, self-awareness with earnest escapism.

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022) is a recent example of a movie in this vein, and I Play Rocky has a similar feel. Even as it lifts the veil on the Hollywood myth factory and mines many laughs out of the fundamentally profit-seeking, money-centric nature of the movie business, it’s full of heart and soul. It has a joyful, hopeful, sincere, perhaps idealistic spirit (“I’d rather be an optimist and be wrong, than a pessimist and be right,” one character says).

Refreshing Celebration of Marriage

I also like how I Play Rocky celebrates the empowering beauty of marriage. The film opens with Stallone as a broke actor in New York, sometimes sleeping on the streets and at one point accepting a role in an X-rated adult film just to earn some desperately needed money (a dark part of Stallone’s past that the film plays for awkward laughs). He’s a lost soul with bleak prospects. But then he meets Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb), with whom he works at a movie theater. They get married and move to Los Angeles, and things start to turn around for him.

As a husband and soon a father, Stallone feels more urgency to provide. He valets at a swanky Hollywood restaurant to pay the bills while he churns out scripts that he tries to get into influential hands. Sasha types the scripts for him and encourages him at every turn, even as they struggle to pay rent. At one point, she reminds him, “It’s not just you against the world. It’s us against the world.” She’s his ally and cheerleader, believing in him when few else do.

Stallone’s parents were divorced, and he had a complicated relationship with his father, Frank (Matt Dillon). Yet I Play Rocky doesn’t play the “blame my parents for all my trauma” card—which is also refreshing. At one point, Stallone says, “My dad, he messed up a lot. But it’s my life.” Stallone doesn’t blame anyone else for the bad choices he’s made or the setbacks he’s had. His story is his own. At a time when it seems every other movie is some version of therapeutic moral absolution for sinners and villains, on account of their broken upbringing, it’s nice to have a movie that pushes back against this.

“It’s my story,” Stallone tells the producers who want to turn his Rocky script into a film. “So I play Rocky.”

Searching for Stories

We used to just tell stories. Now we tell stories about stories. We write books about story and the spiritual deprivation of a destoried world. We hunger for old stories but struggle to invent new ones. Hence the appeal of a movie like I Play Rocky, which finds new narrative inspiration only by mining a classic.

Our contemporary world is so uprooted, so unplaced in space and time, so rattled and wearied by what Hartmut Rosa calls “social acceleration,” that we feel removed or alienated from our own stories. We’re simultaneously hyperskeptical of the stories we’re told (you see this clearly in the popularity of You Can See Everything) and deeply hungry to find our own story, to be situated in a compelling narrative that’s going somewhere and has redemption, purpose, a point.

This is metamodernism’s complicated relationship with story. There’s still a residual postmodern skepticism about all stories and storytelling, but also a growing recognition that we can’t live outside of stories and storytelling—at least in the subjective, “my story” sense.

There’s still a residual postmodern skepticism about all stories and storytelling, but also a growing recognition that we can’t live outside of stories and storytelling.

Perhaps it’s downstream from social media turning us all into performers for audiences, but it feels like there’s a pressure to “find your story” (a.k.a. your brand/niche), own it, and guard it from others who might want to manipulate or leverage it for their purposes.

The 2026 comedy Power Ballad touches on some of these themes of creative ownership, as does Taylor Swift in her “Taylor’s Version” series of rerecorded albums. The recent movie Digger explores the way creative control and story-crafting can be PR—shaping one’s image or the reputation of someone you love. I Play Rocky is the latest pop-culture celebration of storytelling as agency: telling your story in just the way you want it to be told.

As much as this sort of storytelling is pitched as empowerment and agency, however, it also feels burdensome and exhausting. Do we really find freedom when we’re constantly obsessing over our story, or our backstory (e.g. TikTok “lore drop” trend), and how it’s perceived by online fans and followers?

The story poverty in today’s world won’t find a satisfying resolution in hyperindividuated narrative obsession. What we really need is a grander story—something bigger than “my story,” bigger than your story. What’s truly freeing is not owning our own story but seeing ourselves as part of God’s story—owned by him, our lives not our own. This is our only hope in life and death.