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The winning idea behind screenwriter Peter Gamble and director Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky was to retrace the making of a classic 20th century triumph-of-the-underdog saga by fashioning the behind-the-scenes story into its own rousing shot of underdog triumph. Sure, Rocky was the quintessential boomer movie — the top-grossing film of 1976 and an Oscar winner for best picture the following year. But pretty much every generation since has ensured that it remains an influential pop-culture landmark half a century later, its message of self-belief, resilience and determination against stiff odds still a resonant evocation of the American Dream. Who cares if it’s pure fiction?

The strongest asset the new movie has in its corner is actor Anthony Ippolito, who had previously appeared as another member of the Hollywood star firmament, Al Pacino, in the miniseries The Offer, about the chaotic development and production of The Godfather. Having heard about the Rocky project before casting had even begun, Ippolito sent in a self-taped audition that convinced the filmmakers they had found their guy. That decision turns out to have been unquestionably right, potentially sparking debate as to whether he’s a better actor than Stallone. (Seriously, have you tried watching Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot?)

Gamble’s script starts out in New York, where frustrated young actor Sylvester, then going by Mike, works a series of dead-end jobs while auditioning for the same thankless bit parts as thugs and cops. One of those jobs is ticket taker at a movie theater, where pretty blonde box office cashier Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb), who would become his first wife, catches his eye. 

Stallone’s infamous early foray into softcore porn on a film quaintly titled The Party at Kitty and Stud’s — later re-released as Italian Stallion after Stallone had found fame — is given sanitized treatment as an economic necessity when he is kicked out of his grungy rooming house over unpaid rent and forced to sleep on the street.

The film jumps ahead 16 months, when Sylvester and Sasha have relocated to Los Angeles, still struggling to stay afloat. A friendly customer at the restaurant where Sylvester works as a valet parking attendant gives him an “in” with his producer buddies Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell) and Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne). The meeting yields nothing concrete, but Sylvester slips his script for Paradise Alley into a slush pile on the way out. Chartoff and Winkler are impressed, though not quite enough to option it — the movie would resurface elsewhere two years later as Stallone’s directing debut, greenlit on the strength of his Rocky fame — but they invite him to come back and show them anything else he has written.

Inspired after watching the 15-round Muhammed Ali-Chuck Wepner fight in a bar, Sylvester goes home fired up and cranks out the Rocky script in three-and-a-half days. Chartoff and Winkler immediately go for it and start tossing around possible names to star as the southpaw boxer of the title — Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Ryan O’Neal. But Sylvester rejects the deal, stating his one condition: “I play Rocky.”

There are fun insights into the art of the moviemaking deal, first in Chartoff and Winkler’s negotiations with irascible Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts), a composite studio exec, and next in a protracted back and forth with Stallone, as their offer to buy the script climbs to $360,000, an astronomical fee back then for a first-time screenwriter. But still Sylvester refuses to budge, insisting that he poured his heart and soul into the role and refusing to hand it off to another actor.

While Gamble’s script isn’t exactly subtle about it, the themes of perseverance and force of will that are so essential to Rocky are traced back to Stallone’s unwavering commitment to a part that’s in his bones. Refusing to let the commercially promising project wither and die, the producers opt to halve the already meager $2 million budget agreed to by Maddox, allowing them to cast anyone they want.

The extent to which Chartoff and Winkler are on board with Maddox’s contractual loophole is kept vague. But the budget and shooting schedule are so tight that any overage means Sylvester can be fired immediately and replaced by another actor. To help bring the film in on time, they hire director John G. Avildsen (Jay Duplass), known for his efficiency with fast, frugal shoots.

Since every underdog story needs an antagonist trying to beat them down, Sasha believes the filmmakers are conspiring to sabotage her husband’s involvement by breaking him physically, pushing him to the point of exhaustion. On top of six hours a day of intensive boxing training, they have him run some 20 miles all over the city on the first day of location shooting in Philadelphia (New York was prohibitively expensive). A doctor advises him to stay off his feet for two weeks due to a pulled tendon. But Sylvester knows that would get him kicked off the film.

The most iconic scenes from Rocky — notably the training montage; the sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rocky raising his arms in triumph at the top; the bare-knuckle pounding at frozen sides of beef in a meat storage room; the ice rink interlude with Talia Shire (Kiki Seto) — are recreated with reverential respect for the original, some more effectively than others. But even when all this plays like visual karaoke, anyone with a soft spot for Rocky will likely find themselves hit by a wave of warm nostalgia.

As he showed in his 2018 solo directing debut, Green Book, which won the best picture Oscar the following year, Farrelly is a populist director who feels no compulsion to challenge his audience. In that case, he offered a soft, conciliatory take on the racial divide, while in I Play Rocky, he doesn’t shy away from sentimental excess and even a slight shlockiness. The sainthood of Stallone here is shamelessly manipulative, but it works, restoring a likable everyman quality that’s been obscured by decades of celebrity baggage.

There are stirring breakthrough moments built into the movie, such as a confrontation between Rocky and Mickey, the old-timer who wants to manage him, played by Burgess Meredith (Robert Morgan). Avildsen says the scene as written is not delivering, prompting Stallone to step away for five minutes and return with a semi-improvised reworking of it that socks across the emotional stakes.

The action again jumps forward, to the premiere of Rocky, “ten months and one baby later.” The jittery artist too anxious to sit still and watch his work on opening night is a hoary trope of showbiz movies. But when the movie’s premiere audience stands and cheers in a moment of glory, clumps of the Toronto audience at I Play Rocky’s first screening did the same. Irrespective of Stallone’s political affiliations, this is a feel-good movie that should play equally well across red and blue states.

Farrelly coaxes solid performances from the ensemble, particularly Robb, who makes Sasha the opposite of a mousy wife, lovingly supportive but also tough-talking and opinionated. Kebbel and Byrne are an amusing double-act as Chartoff and Winkler, the latter now 95 and still producing, recently with the Creed movies and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Letts was born to play this kind of brutally blunt, ruthless-when-necessary businessman, and Duplass brings a kind of impish spark to Avildsen, making him seem a director who thrives under pressure.

There are strong moments also with Matt Dillon as Sylvester’s verbally abusive father Frank, who became a hairdresser when his acting career failed to take off; and Stephan James, who has a hilarious intro scene as Carl Weathers, strutting into his audition with the natural authority of Apollo Creed, his muscles packed into a superfly 1970s denim outfit, with his bare torso oiled and glistening.

The element that holds the movie together is Ippolito, who nails the garbled, rumbling diction, hangdog expression and hulking physicality of Stallone while never losing sight of his insecurities at this unproven point in his career. I Play Rocky repurposes most of its emotional uplift from the movie within the movie, but anyone with fond memories of the boxing drama — perhaps those who first saw it back in the day most of all — will feel a surge of elation from the moment Bill Conti’s theme music is folded in.

Musk documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney responded Sunday to a documentary legal threat from Elon Musk.

“I reached out immediately… But he clearly wasn’t interested in talking. We made so many formal outreaches to him, and with the exception of his remarks on Twitter, we received nothing back,” Gibney said during a keynote conversation in Toronto.

The veteran doc maker said Musk was heavily lawyered and fact-checked, so he’s confident about the veracity of his account of the tech billionaire. But he told the TIFF audience he has “great concern” that Bleecker Street will be able to theatrically release the near-four hour documentary in October and HBO Max will be able to stream the film, as planned, before Warner Bros. Discovery is taken over Paramount as part of an ongoing merger and acquisition process.

“I do worry about the storm clouds on the horizon and the fact that they (HBO) are in the midst of a takeover battle by Paramount. Larry Ellison, who is cited in the film, is one of Elon’s friends and one of the investors in his takeover of Twitter… But so far, so good,” Gibney said. “It’s a great concern and the consolidation of the media and also the aggressive editorial takeover of the media by the tech barons is really deeply concerning,” he added.

Gibney’s comments follow the Musk film world premiering in Venice before shifting to TIFF for a North American bow on Monday. The world premiere was followed by attorney Alex Spiro, acting for Musk, sending Gibney and his production team a letter, alleging they had misrepresented facts about the tech mogul.

And Musk himself blasted the film as a “boring … hit piece” on X. The letter — confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter — focuses on what Spiro says is an insinuation in the film that Musk used his Starlink satellites to somehow influence the 2024 presidential election to boost Donald Trump.

Earlier, Jigsaw Productions issued a statement after receiving Spiro’s letter: “Alex Gibney’s films are consistently recognized for their in-depth, fact-driven explorations of influential figures and corporations, coupled with his bold and engaging directorial style. This approach has garnered him international praise, an Academy Award among other accolades, and a reputation that The Times of London recently lauded as the ‘gold standard for fearless journalistic integrity.’ The right to engage in open debate and fact-based examinations of powerful public figures is protected by the First Amendment — something that should be recognized and defended by all Americans, including the associates of Elon Musk, who has proclaimed himself to be a ‘free speech absolutist.’”

Musk is Gibney’s most recent film and follows a career making documentaries that investigate powerful institutions and individuals. In Musk, Gibney looks at the tech mogul behind electric cars, space travel, social media, AI, and more.

During his keynote, Gibney discussed Elon Musk’s infamous DOGE purge and its impact on the independence and financing of USAID, the foreign aid agency. “When you’re into hundreds of thousands of people who are killed by performative cruelty, it’s really a staggering moral stain on Elon Musk and the federal government,” he argued.

Gibney also discussed Musk’s use of stock manipulation, as well as securing government handouts and energy credits, as part of his exploitation of financial markets. “You’ve got a con artist who has put in the White House another con artist, and they just keep running bigger and bigger cons, because there’s no Department of Justice or FBI to tell them to do otherwise,” he told the TIFF audience.

Gibney is also a producer of Edward Said: Between Worlds, a film about the Palestinian scholar, that is also screening at the Toronto Film Festival. “I just find him such a compelling public intellectual at a time when there’s a dearth of public intellectuals who engagement with such a sense of humanism, and obviously this is one of the great global scandals of this moment, the genocide in Gaza and the horrific things that are happening on the West Bank,” he said.

Gibney’s other films include the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, The Last Gladiators, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, The Armstrong Lie and Citizen K.

In Jon Hamm’s new series, American Hostage, he stars as a local news broadcaster who finds himself in the middle of a hostage situation when a disgruntled borrower kidnaps a mortgage broker.

The 1977 true crime story, which was chronicled on a narrative podcast of the same name also starring Hamm, is decades old, but its political themes closely mirror today’s world, Hamm told The Hollywood Reporter on Sunday.

“ I think that there’s some thematic devices that resonate in the culture politically now,” Hamm said at The Hollywood Reporter’s Studio at 1 Hotel during TIFF, presented by sponsor Canada Goose. “I think the idea of a certain segment of the population being overlooked, or feeling overlooked or feeling under-addressed, in their wants and needs and desires. The show is called American Hostage. We fought very hard for that title because we thought it really spoke to the story on several occasions. This man obviously takes a person hostage, but is he in fact hostage to his American Dream?” 

“There’s a lot of resonance to the title,” the Emmy winner added. “I think that’s why the story, for whatever reason, feels — even though it’s a 50-year-old true story — it feels very relevant, given the current political climate.” 

Co-created by Shawn Ryan and Eileen Myers, American Hostage is described by Sony as a “psychological thriller that tells the harrowing true story of Fred Heckman, a beloved Indianapolis radio reporter who is thrust into the middle of a life-or-death crisis when hostage-taker, Tony Kiritsis, demands to be interviewed on his popular radio news program.”

The news story on which the series is based made headlines at the time and reflected a changing media landscape, where live local stories made national news. For Hamm, the local news story he remembers as being the most significant is O.J. Simpson’s infamous police chase in June 1994.   

“ I think probably most people’s first experience of any of that was the O.J. situation because it happened in the middle of a huge sporting event,” Hamm said. “It was national. Most of us live in L.A., and L.A. had a car chase kind of every day, but it was very local. That became a very daily kind of thing in the ’90s. Some helicopter would chase some car going somewhere. The original one was most likely the O.J. situation.” 

“If you go back in time, this [1977 Tony Kiritsis case] is one of the first times we kind of see a local story explode nationally,” Hamm continued. “Another similar thing that happened was the Patty Hearst situation, where when they raided the house down in South Central Los Angeles. … It was the beginning of where we are now. I think the salacious part of this story — through no fault of its own — [it became] this life or death story. [It’s] kind of where we have landed now, where everything is maximized for the salaciousness of its content.” 

American Hostage also shows how audiences previously trusted the information delivered by their news organizations, in stark contrast to today where trust in the media remains at record lows, according to data from Gallup. Ryan emphasized that the “journalistic aspect to the show” is “very pertinent today.”   

“Right now, we live in a very fractured journalist world,” Ryan explained. “You can kind of choose your news more than the news really informing you these days. Back then, I’m old enough to remember what it was like for journalists to be trusted and for the news to be something that was sacred.”

Ryan added that Hamm’s character is “stuck in a very precarious position” in the series because he’s a journalist “who has invested decades into building his reputation as telling the truth … and now he’s also expected to be a hostage negotiator and to try to save two lives.”  

American Hostage is scheduled to premiere on MGM+ on Sept. 20.