‘I Play Rocky’ Recreates Stallone’s Iconic Gray Sweatsuit—But Something’s a Bit Off

Basically, I Play Rocky is a movie about a guy playing a guy playing a guy, and the costume knows it. The hoodie looks perfect—too perfect. The cotton’s got that just-right heathered-gray fade, the sleeves are artfully frayed and distressed, and even the “sweat” looks strategically placed. It’s all there, yet somehow the realism…isn’t real. The original hoodie wasn’t “styled”; it was lived in. Stallone’s costume was wrinkled, grimy, and looked like it was genuinely on its last breath. This version feels like it comes with an on-set humidifier.

Perhaps that’s part of the charm. I Play Rocky isn’t remaking Rocky—it’s about how Rocky came to be. The meta layers are baked in: Ippolito plays Stallone, who was playing Balboa, who was playing the version of himself he wanted the world to believe in. So when Ippolito runs those steps in a hoodie that’s almost right but not quite, it fits the theme nicely. After all, recreating authenticity is impossible task.

It’s also worth noting that, according to an interview with The Playlist, Sylvester Stallone claims he’s not involved in the film. This might explain why the magic’s hard to bottle. Per the interview, he’s wished the cast well, but this story is being told entirely without the man who lived it, which might be the problem when it comes to the finer details. In the Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere, Bruce Springsteen was regularly on set; as the film’s costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone recently told British GQ, “We had this amazing moment when [Springsteen] responded to specific [costume] pieces… Respecting his memory of those clothes was essential. He knows exactly what felt like him.”

Maybe that’s why the I Play Rocky look doesn’t quite land. It’s too clean, too self-aware, too meta, but also it also proves how powerful that original image still is. Fifty years on, even a replica of Rocky’s sweats can get us talking—that’s how you know the myth still works.

A version of this story originally appeared on British GQ.