Sly Is a Messy, Sincere Portrait of a Messy, Sincere Man

This documentary about Sylvester Stallone leaves a lot unsaid. But it does get at the heart of his career.

I was never much of a Sylvester Stallone fan as a kid. I was certainly the right age when his Rocky and Rambo sequels were coming out in the 1980s, but that brand of aggressive, muscle-bound machismo, which found favor in an America eager to refight the battles of the ’60s and ’70s, I found off-putting; Sly and some of his ’roided-up imitators seemed like flesh-and-blood manifestations of reactionary, Reaganite rage.

But I learned to appreciate the man as I got older. I enjoyed that period when he caught a second wind in the ’90s, with films like Cliffhanger and Demolition Man, and I adored his performance in Copland. I was even there opening night for Judge Dredd (which, sadly, stank). When I saw Stallone speak at Cannes a few years ago, I found him to be forthright, humble, and funny.

It is that same Stallone we see in Sly, the new documentary that’s more a selective apologia than a thorough accounting. Stallone relates some familiar anecdotes from his career — like that time when a Dolph Lundgren punch nearly killed him, or how he came up with the idea for The Expendables while watching a terrible nostalgia-rock reunion concert — but at the heart of the movie are the feelings of inadequacy he was cursed with by an abusive father. We hear about the young Sly’s love of horses and polo, which were scuttled when his dad ran onto the field and tore him off his horse during a game. Later, as adults, they played polo together; this time, his father seriously injured him during the match. We learn that, after the success of Rocky, his father tried to get his own boxing movie off the ground, called Sonny! That bit I had to rewind twice, to make sure I heard it right.

The 77-year-old Stallone’s face nowadays is as sculpted as his body was back in the day; the perpetually arched eyebrows don’t move much, so we don’t see a ton of emotion on his face as he opens up about all this heartbreak. Intentional or not, it works. He looks more bemused than sad, or outraged, which, in the moment, makes him an ideal storyteller. The film’s loose framing device has Stallone moving house from California back to the East Coast, and director Thom Zimny probably spends too much time lingering over shots of statues and figurines of Stallone over the ages being wrapped and packaged for the move. But, well, why be subtle or restrained in a movie about Sylvester Stallone?

Zimny, a veteran music-video and concert-doc director, treats Stallone like a bit of a rock star. He lets us watch the actor move as he talks, walking down the street or gesturing with those enormous arms of his. There are talking heads here — New York Times critic Wesley Morris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Quentin Tarantino among them — but their insights are limited to a few impressions. By and large, Stallone narrates his own story, which means he controls it. (He also executive-produced the film.) We don’t hear much about his tumultuous private life or his controversies. The bombs discussed are a select few. So Sly isn’t a critical movie. But it’s also not a hagiography, either. It adopts Stallone’s own partly bemused attitude toward his own career.

Stallone’s limitations as an actor were the keys to his success. That’s true of all movie stars, but it’s maybe truer of him than anyone else. It was the actor’s inability to find good roles that led to his writing Rocky for himself to star in, as a bruiser “with a gentle touch,” as he puts it. But once his career took off, Stallone distanced himself from that idea, as the Rocky movies became cartoonish, macho spectacles. A similar reverse alchemy happened with the character of John Rambo, who went from the violent, doomed psychopath of David Morrell’s novel First Blood to a noble, lone-wolf warrior in Stallone’s Rambo sequels, a one-man do-over of the Vietnam War and its attendant catastrophes.

Stallone understandably has a higher estimation of the emotional resonance of some of those films than I do. His acting may have been stiff, but the sincerity was there. He channeled his feelings about his father into his big acting moments in these movies. And a desire to be a better father than the one he had led to his casting his son Sage as Rocky’s son in Rocky V. (A different actor played the character in 2006’s Rocky Balboa. Sage tragically died in 2012.)

Stallone feels strongly about these later Rocky films, regardless of what others may think of them. But in this, he appears to have found peace. These movies, he seems to suggest, were more expressions of frustration and impotence than anything else. That the emotions weren’t always convincing to some of us doesn’t really matter; what matters is that he lived them and felt them. As a movie, Sly is something of a mess. But as a portrait of a messy man, it can be quite moving.