Two reviews, one Toronto premiere, and almost no agreement between them. That's where "I Play Rocky" stands after its festival bow, a film that tells the story of how Sylvester Stallone wrote, sold and starred in "Rocky" nearly 50 years ago.

The film, directed by Peter Farrelly from a script by Peter Gamble, opens with Stallone broke in a Times Square flophouse in 1974, auditioning for parts as nameless thugs and adopting a stray pug because he can't afford much else. It follows him to Los Angeles with his soon-to-be wife Sasha, through a parking-lot job, and eventually to March 1975, when a televised fight between Muhammad Ali and underdog challenger Chuck Wepner supposedly lights the spark for "Rocky." Producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff love the script. Studio suit Sandy Maddox offers real money for it. Stallone won't sell unless he gets to play the lead himself, and that refusal, repeated at increasingly large sums, becomes the engine of the film's second act.

Anthony Ippolito plays Stallone, and it's his performance that both critics single out first, though they land in different places. Variety's review calls Ippolito's channeling of Stallone's voice and look "a miraculous act of channeling," praising the low growl and unhurried delivery that make the impersonation feel like more than mimicry. Variety went as far as comparing the film's spirit to Richard Linklater's "Nouvelle Vague" from last year, another making-of movie that found meaning in how its subject actually worked.

TheWrap saw something thinner. Its review argues Ippolito nails the voice but not the soul, and that the film as a whole "never uncovers that deeper emotional why" behind Stallone's stubbornness, reducing an unlikely success story to something flat and overexplained. The reviewer points to a scene where director John Avildsen, played by Jay Duplass, pushes Sly to dig deeper on set, a moment TheWrap reads as the film unintentionally diagnosing its own problem.

Both reviews agree the script by Peter Gamble spells things out more than it needs to, and both single out AnnaSophia Robb as Sasha and Stephan James's brief appearance as Carl Weathers. Where they diverge is on whether any of it adds up to something worth sitting through, with Variety calling it a