Instead, in one of the greatest upsets in Oscar history, “Rocky” won, an event that, between “Jaws” opening two years earlier and “Star Wars” looming on the horizon, would sound the death knell for the taut, sophisticated, politically aware and proudly pessimistic movies that had made the 1970s so great.
That narrative — that Sylvester Stallone helped destroy Hollywood’s last Golden Age — is never addressed directly in “Sly,” a new documentary about Stallone on Netflix. But it is upended, if only obliquely. The film, by Thom Zimny, challenges several assumptions about Stallone, who narrates his life in startlingly candid, often heartbreaking, recollections about his rise and occasional falls. What emerges isn’t the superstar who turned Rocky and Rambo into American icons as much as a thoughtful, surprisingly self-aware artist, who happens to be much smarter, more sensitive and steeped in cinematic history than even his biggest fans might have known.
It’s fitting that Zimny would be the filmmaker to tell Stallone’s story. For the past 25 years, his main gig has been collaborating with Bruce Springsteen on more than two dozen documentaries, music videos and visual albums — meaning that Zimny knows his way around pop culture heroes who are simultaneously adored and misunderstood. Both Springsteen and Stallone have channeled their inner selves through art to create a third identity, one that exists somewhere between truth and fiction, that has become a potent avatar, especially for their male fans. “They’ve created these characters that give that idea of hope, and that a viewer can step into, or a listener can step into,” Zimny observed in a recent Zoom conversation. As different as their respective personae are, he added, “they’re both talking about the dreams of America, and identity.”
In the case of Stallone, as he explains in “Sly,” that identity is grounded in trauma and almost superhuman determination. Born in Hell’s Kitchen (“I was New York,” he says fondly), he and his brother Frank lived mostly in boardinghouses until his parents moved the family to Maryland; when the couple divorced, his mother took his brother Frank to Philadelphia and Stallone stayed behind with his father.
As “Sly” makes excruciatingly clear, Stallone — like so many creative obsessives — has been driven by deep primal wounds, starting with his parents’ tempestuous marriage, a “very physical” father and a mother who was in such denial about becoming a parent that she almost gave birth on a bus. The signature Stallone snarl is the result of facial paralysis caused by complications during Stallone’s delivery at a charity hospital. Stallone’s chief refuge, even as a child, was the movie house, where he could revel in the mythic physical presence of Steve Reeves in “Hercules” or find solace in the strength and vulnerability of Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.”
“Sly” illuminates, maybe for the first time, the psychological depth of characters who have become misremembered, despite being beloved. The Vietnam veteran in “Rambo” almost immediately became an avatar for Reagan-era bellicosity, even though the actual character is a suffering, haunted soldier suffering from PTSD. Rocky’s up-from-the-streets fable doesn’t end with the underdog winning the big fight — instead, he gets the girl (“Yo, Adrian!”) and the family he never thought could be within his reach. Seen through the lens of Stallone’s broken relationships, especially with a father whose cruelty continued even after his son became a huge star, Rocky and Rambo aren’t macho aspirational figures as much as personifications of the self-doubt, pain and loneliness that Stallone pours into everything he does, whether it’s a screenplay, a performance or a painting.
As characters, Rocky and Rambo also personify Stallone’s principles when it comes to filmmaking, which he approaches with a simplicity that shouldn’t be confused with superficiality. Harking back to cinema’s roots as a silent medium, when actions literally spoke louder than words, “Rocky” and the Rambo movies were works of movement, pacing and purity of line — their most expressive instrument Stallone’s own face, a screen object of such mournful beauty it might have leaped from a Bronzino portrait.
“I’m a big believer, when I write, to not worry about the flawed aspects of it,” Stallone says in an archival interview used in “Sly.” “I know that maybe 90 percent of it is worthless, but the idea that you have a beginning, middle and an end is very important to me.” “Rocky,” the film he was talking about, turned out to be a testament to just that kind of unfussy, pared-down narrative aesthetic, wherein values like belief, devotion and hope can win the day — even against the downbeat backdrop of Philadelphia at its most trashed-out and scrappy.
If they’re honest, the film snobs who thought the wrong movie won in 1977 would admit that “Rocky” comes by its catharsis honestly. It might take place in a different world than its best-picture competitors, but it’s just as grounded in gritty realism, honoring Hollywood’s time-honored tradition of delivering rousing uplift within old-school pugilistic action. If the “Rocky” movies became increasingly fantastical — if, as Quentin Tarantino suggests in “Sly,” opponents played by the likes of Mr. T and Dolph Lundgren paved the way for the cartoonish superheroes that would dominate American movies for the next few decades — that shouldn’t detract from the central truth that the original franchise, as well as the “Creed” sequels, have always been about a couple that pointedly stayed together, no matter what. “It’s a love story,” Sly says repeatedly, while listening to himself talk about “Rocky” in a 70s-era interview. “I couldn’t say it back then.”
Most meaningfully, “Rocky” stands as the quintessential example of the cinematic universe Stallone has been building his entire career, by way of wish-fulfillment fables that offered the redemption he craved rather than the cynicism that might have been more fashionable — and, in his case, more justified. “The act of watching movies, the act of writing movies, the act of making movies — it all gave him an opportunity to create his own reality and control the narrative,” Zimny said. In the world Stallone was building, “a Vietnam vet can fight off an army of soldiers in the woods and survive, and a boxer can transcend just being a local bum and become a champion.”
Or, as Stallone himself says in one of the film’s most poignant moments, “I wish I’d had a father like Rocky.” Just as it turns out that Stallone’s snarl wasn’t an affectation, “Sly” makes it clear that he never set out to destroy a Golden Age with his movies. He wasn’t even trying to invent a new one. Instead, he was trying to heal his life, one scene at a time. Seen through one lens, “Sly” tells the improbable story of a star being born. Through another, it shows how cinema at its purest can move beyond spectacle to become a supreme act of self-creation.