Anthony Ippolito plays a young Sylvester Stallone in the first trailer for 'I Play Rocky'

Amazon MGM Studios released the first trailer for I Play Rocky on July 15, and the whole pitch is right there in the title. Anthony Ippolito, hooded eyes and slurred cadence and drooped lip and all, plays Sylvester Stallone in 1975: a broke actor with a script studios want and one demand nobody will grant him, which is to star in it himself.

The film is about the making of Rocky, not the fights inside it. Stallone wrote the screenplay in a matter of days, and then, as the legend has it, turned down studio money that would have ended his money problems because the offer came with a bankable name in the lead instead of him. I Play Rocky is the version of that story where you watch him hold the line while his bank balance argues back.

Peter Farrelly directs from a script by Peter Gamble. That is a more interesting pairing than a making-of drama usually gets. Farrelly won an Oscar for Green Book and spent the decade before that on broad comedies, and a story about a stubborn nobody talking his way into the lead of his own life sits squarely in his wheelhouse. The logline Amazon is running with does the heavy lifting: a struggling actor with a partially paralyzed face and a speech impediment writes something a studio wants, refuses to sell unless he plays the lead, and works for scraps to get it made his way.

One wrinkle the trailer leaves out: Stallone had nothing to do with any of this. He has said he was never contacted about the film and only learned it existed after reading about it, though he added he would be open to coming aboard as a consultant given he had no hand in it so far. A movie about the most personal gamble of his career, made without a word to him, is either a problem the finished film will have to answer for or a fitting bit of irony. Probably both.

The supporting bench is stacked with people playing people you know. Stephan James is Carl Weathers, the Apollo Creed to Ippolito's Rocky. AnnaSophia Robb plays Sasha Czack, Stallone's first wife. Matt Dillon turns up as Stallone's father, Frank Stallone Sr. Jay Duplass plays Rocky director John G. Avildsen, with Toby Kebbell and P.J. Byrne as producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, the men who actually wrote the checks. Robert Morgan plays Burgess Meredith and Kiki Seto plays Talia Shire.

Farrelly shot the film last fall in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, with Sean Porter behind the camera. Amazon MGM has it dated for a limited theatrical release in mid-November before it expands wide on November 20, which drops it into theaters almost exactly fifty years after Rocky first played in 1976. The Thanksgiving slot is the kind of counter-programming a feel-good underdog picture is built for.

The trap with a movie about a beloved movie is easy to name. Play it as reverent nostalgia and you get a clip reel in period wigs. The trailer suggests Farrelly is aiming for something scrappier, the story of a guy annoying enough to bet on himself and right enough to collect. The open question is Ippolito. The impression lands in the trailer, but an impression is a trick you can pull for two minutes, and a lead runs two hours. He gets a handful of lines here to hint there is a performance under the voice. We find out in November whether there is.