Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sly’ on Netflix, a Documentary Snapshot of a Reflective and Vulnerable Sylvester Stallone

The access-documentary pantheon continues to grow with a profile of a tough guy with a squishy interior: Sly (now on Netflix), about Sylvester Stallone, which could be subtitled The Emotional Journey of an Action Hero. Notably, it follows another Netflix exclusive, Arnold, which clocked three episodes and three hours to this movie’s 95 minutes. If these guys were still rivals instead of backslappin’ buddies, Sly might be pissed. But in this film, he seems to be past all that silliness, and ready to reflect upon his life and the passage of time with the intensity of, say, a boxer who just won’t go down, or maybe a screw-loose Vietnam vet with a cadre of bad guys in the sights of his bazooka. This doc asserts that the man wasn’t too terribly far removed from his iconic characters, and to be honest, if his story doesn’t choke you up at least a little bit, you must be made of stone.

SLY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: OK, I fully admit that “screw-loose” does no justice to John Rambo. Much is made in Sly about how Stallone improvised a key speech in First Blood where all of Rambo’s trauma comes spilling out, a gut-wrenching scene that shows his considerable skill as an actor and renders the film a dark character study, and more than just violent, action-packed escapism. Of course, Rambo would go on to mow down everything in his path – trees, tanks, brown-skinned people – in a series of gory-ass sequels that wouldn’t exist if Sly hadn’t insisted on Rambo surviving the First Blood finale instead of “dying in slow motion” as originally planned. He says he didn’t want millions of struggling vets to believe there was no hope for their troubled souls, and he’s so frank and sincere, you can’t help but believe him. “I’m in the hope business,” he insists near the end of Sly. 

And so the documentary gets into how and why he achieved so much in that business. We meet him as he’s about to move out of his Los Angeles mansion “to move east” (namely, to Florida, which the film doesn’t mention, because, perhaps surprisingly, it’s more touchy-feely than detailed). The place is lined with modern abstract art and statues of Rocky and Rambo, which we see being taken down and moved out, symbols of his past that he might be ready to put behind him. He’s incredibly reflective, musing on how quickly time has passed for him, how he’s “drying up like an old fig.” He visits his birthplace, Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, for the first time in decades, then gets into his rough-and-tumble childhood: His parents were always fighting; they split, Sly’s mother taking brother Frank to Philadelphia, and his father taking Sly to rural Maryland. There, the delinquent Sly went to 13 schools in 12 years, and became a nationally ranked polo player – until his routinely abusive father knocked him off his horse in a (nonsensical, it seems) jealous rage. He quit playing polo on the spot.

From there, Sly was bit by the acting bug, moving back to New York for a supporting role in The Lords of Flatbush, where he met Henry Winkler; they were friends before the Fonz and Rocky became household names. He wrote and wrote and wrote screenplays, schlepped out to Los Angeles, tried to sell himself as the writer/director/star of a movie inspired by On the Waterfront and Mean Streets, about a palooka boxer who falls in love with another misfit soul. At one point, studios were trying to pay him not to star in it – nobody could get past his physical features to see the passionate actor within, who could quite ably channel the pain of his upbringing into a character. He finally, finally, FINALLY got Rocky made, and the rest is history.

But Stallone isn’t interested in the nuts and bolts of his life as a superstar actor and filmmaker. He’d rather talk about how “going to the mountain isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” We hear testimonials from Frank Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, film critic Wesley Morris, Quentin Tarantino, Rocky co-star Talia Shire, Winkler and more as Sly drills down into key moments in movies we kinda tend to write off as mere of-their-time entertainment: How he channeled his pain into parts of Rocky II and Rocky III and First Blood and Rocky IV and Rocky V and Rocky Balboa, all of them mirroring his growth as a person, an actor, a star and, yes, Sylvester Stallone is an artist. Truly. An artist. I was sort of convinced of that assertion before watching this doc, but am truly, honestly convinced of it after.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Arnold is a different beast entirely, so it’s a mostly superficial comparison. Sly has more in common with intimate profiles like Pamela Anderson’s Pamela, A Love Story or Robert Downey Jr.-and-his-father doc Sr.

Performance Worth Watching: Arnold. I’m sorry, but Arnold is such a gregarious and colorful interviewee, he stands out among a relatively sober pack of talking heads. (Note: Only Arnold, and nobody else, can make Quentin Tarantino look sober.) 

Memorable Dialogue: Morris details the innate contradiction at the core of Rocky that makes it such a unique, crowd-pleasing piece of cinema: “The movie was rigged to make you feel like he won.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Director Thom Zimny compiles a thoughtful, introspective bio that’s refreshingly free of Oscar speeches or lengthy montages of movie clips – they’d clash with the overall tone here, which is deeply reflective and frequently heartbreaking. Zimny returns to two things regularly: The first is audio from decades-old interviews on cassettes Sly plays on a tape recorder; the actor bemoans how his old self seemingly refused to call Rocky what it truly is, a love story. The second is Sly’s father, a recurring theme of personal tragedy that pops up like a melancholy musical refrain. Want a particularly sad tune? Here’s one: In the ’80s, Sly invited his pops to a charity polo match he’d organized. Unprovoked, and inexplicably, his father whacked Sly in the back with a mallet, knocking him off his horse. We see a clip of it, and it looks painful. Sly says after that, he sold his horses and polo gear and the ranch and once again vowed to never play again.

This all seems pretty revealing for those of us who haven’t watched Sly’s reality series, The Family Stallone; go there if you want to see him interact with his wife and daughters, who are barely mentioned here (he pretty much avoids discussing the loss of his son Sage, who died of coronary artery disease at age 36). Sly is by no means a definitive bio – it’s more focused on showing us the squishy underbelly of a man who’s been built like a shit brickhouse for the last 50 years, and is famous for his monosyllabic action-movie personae. The doc functions counter to the tough guy we might think he is, and although it feels calculated, it’s undoubtedly honest, a snapshot of a disarmingly sensitive man who’s looking back on all the work that led to literal monuments being built in honor of his legacy (he even has a massive Rocky statue in his home), and what it all might mean to him now. The film is varnished in the sense that it sticks primarily to Sly’s point-of-view, sidestepping his vanity and ego to lean into his vulnerability and regrets. But it works, because, as it turns out, it’s inspiring to learn that even the greatest movie action heroes have all-too-human weaknesses.

Our Call: Sly is surprisingly insightful for an access documentary about a guy who you might not think would be the type to publicly air some of his deepest thoughts and feelings. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.