There is a version of Hollywood history where Sylvester Stallone sells his 'Rocky' screenplay for somewhere between $25,000 and $360,000 — accounts vary depending on who's telling it and how good the story needs to sound — pockets the cash, and disappears into the background while a bankable star takes the lead. That version never happened. What happened instead became one of the most cited acts of creative stubbornness in American film history, and Amazon MGM Studios is now betting it can carry a feature film on its own.

'I Play Rocky,' directed by Peter Farrelly, dramatizes the behind-the-scenes battle over the original 1976 film — specifically the standoff between a 29-year-old Stallone and producers who wanted the script badly enough to pay for it, but not badly enough to hand the lead role to an unknown. First-look footage released July 15 introduces Anthony Ippolito as Stallone, and the physical transformation is immediately the thing people are going to talk about.

Ippolito's casting is the kind of call that either makes a prestige project or quietly sinks it. Stallone remains one of the most physically recognizable screen presences of the 20th century, and playing him at the specific moment he was inventing that presence is a narrow target. What the footage suggests, though, is that Farrelly is less interested in impersonation than in something more uncomfortable: the psychology of a man who had decided, possibly irrationally, that he was the only person who could play this character — and was staking everything on being right.

The original 'Rocky' was made for approximately $1 million and grossed over $225 million worldwide in its initial theatrical run, according to box office records of the period. It won three Academy Awards including Best Picture. The gap between what studios were willing to offer Stallone for the script alone and what the film ultimately returned is the kind of number that makes the boardroom resistance look, in retrospect, almost comically wrong. But that's the easy version of the story. What 'I Play Rocky' appears to be reaching for is the harder one: what it felt like before the numbers came in, when the resistance was rational and the stubbornness looked like delusion.

Farrelly has spent the back half of his career in territory like this. 'Green Book' — whatever you think of its politics or its awards trajectory — was a film about men who disagreed with each other in a car for two hours, and it worked commercially. The structural challenge with 'I Play Rocky' is different. The audience already knows how it ends. The task is making the uncertainty feel real again, which requires the film to find something other than dramatic irony to live on.

Amazon MGM Studios is not a disinterested party here. The studio holds the 'Rocky' franchise, which means it is simultaneously the custodian of the mythology and the entity funding a film that, if it does its job honestly, will need to portray the studio system of 1975 as an obstacle to the thing that made the franchise worth owning. That's a tension worth watching as the film gets closer to release — not because it will necessarily produce dishonesty, but because the incentive structure is visible.

What the first-look footage does not reveal: a release date, a full cast, or how the film handles the other figures involved in 'Rocky's' production, including producer Irwin Winkler and director John G. Avildsen. The story of how that film got made involves more than one person's stubbornness, and a film that collapses it entirely into a single-protagonist triumph would be telling a cleaner story than the record supports.

For now, the image that lands is Ippolito in Stallone's corner — literally, by the looks of it — and a film that is asking whether the audience still finds meaning in a story about creative conviction from an era when the industry worked differently. Given that the era in question produced one of the highest-return independent productions in American film history, the answer is probably yes. The more interesting question is whether the film earns that answer or just assumes it.