In the Netflix documentary “Sly,” the actor, filmmaker and painter reveals hidden depths.
Ask any film snob if the right movie won best picture in 1977, and you’ll most likely get an earful: That’s the year the masterpieces “All the President’s Men,” “Network” and “Taxi Driver” were in competition, any one of which would have been a respectable entry into the official canon of American cinema.
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 , 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.
“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.
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.
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