‘Sly’ review: Just a man and his will to survive. Sylvester Stallone gets the Netflix doc treatment

Famous for his sad-eyed brawn, Sylvester Stallone doesn’t get much credit for his intelligence or perceptive instincts. A storyteller to his core, he understood from the start that his biggest roles, Rocky and Rambo, were more than just men built to fight, and he helped to redefine what an action movie could be along the way.

But once you attain your dream, he says in the Netflix film “Sly,” it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. “I thought once I made it to the top of the mountain, it was all blue skies,” he says. “It’s not. The air’s thinner. It’s precarious. There’s not many people up there, it’s pretty lonely.”

Compared with the multi-episode treatment most celebrity projects like this receive, the best thing “Sly” has going for it is its 90-minute running time, but even that feels overly long. Despite Stallone’s engaging presence, it’s less a documentary than a career retrospective along the lines of A&E’s “Biography,” but even the old cable series accomplished the same thing in under an hour.

Thankfully, stars still write celebrity memoirs where they dish about who they slept with. Or fought with. A good memoir always involves some score-settling on the page. Maybe even real introspection and rumination about mistakes that were made. But these documentaries are too slick for that, too protective. They are PR, through and through.

Which isn’t to say they can’t be entertaining. You just have to go in with the understanding that you’re watching an elaborate exercise in marketing and celebrity image management. And Stallone is unquestionably a magnetic screen presence. If only the film were able to capture who he is beyond that. But it does allow him occasional moments of pithiness. “I was raised by a very” — he pauses — “physical father.” Violent is what he means. That he would go on to build a career refining violence to a cinematic art is an irony not lost on him. But he’s not asked to contemplate this connection any further.

He has less to say about his mother. Growing up, his parents fought. His brother Frank describes them as self-absorbed, so much so “that they just pawned us off” and Stallone says he lived in a boardinghouse as a child.

Deprived of a nurturing home as a young boy, now as an adult “maybe the nurturing comes from the respect and love of strangers — to feel embraced and loved by an audience. It’s insatiable. I wish I could get over it, but I can’t.”

Movies were his escape, with dreams of becoming an actor. But he had trouble getting roles. “I was always cast as a thug. And I go, OK, that’s true, I am. But I’m also nice. I’m kind of a soft touch. If you could put that together, that would really be a great character.”

Which led him to write the script for “Rocky.”

Instead of allowing Stallone to talk at length about each successive sequel, it would have been interesting to hear about how choices were made in the original that became iconic signposts, from the music (the rousing horns of the “Rocky” theme) to that run up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s also notable that he has nothing to say about the “Creed” films.

Nor does he mention his ongoing feud with “Rocky” producer Irwin Winkler. That’s a conspicuous omission because Stallone’s frustrations are no secret. “In recent years, Stallone has made it very clear that even though the films are inextricably linked with him, he’s not happy about the way the original deal was structured and thinks he should have received an ownership stake,” Variety reported last year.

Maybe there are legal reasons for the film’s silence on this matter. But Stallone himself hasn’t been silent, so the disconnect is notable. But it is also probably why we never hear him talk about how a guy with no connections was able to sell his script in the first place, a story that likely would require invoking Winkler’s name.

After he made “Rocky” in 1976, his next film was about strife within a labor union, playing a Cleveland warehouse worker 1978′s “F.I.S.T.” directed by Norman Jewison. The film didn’t go anywhere, but that he chose this as his breakout success follow-up tells you a lot about Stallone’s array of interests.

Of his private life, we learn very little. His recent marital strife goes unmentioned. In 2012, his son Sage died of a heart attack at age 36, and this is alluded to, but Stallone doesn’t speak about it directly. He certainly doesn’t have to. The death of a child is devastating. But how this affected the rest of his life is not a topic director Thom Zimny broaches. (Zimny is something of a cottage industry of celebrity projects, working previously with Bruce Springsteen and Willie Nelson.) Also absent: Any mention of Stallone’s current series “Tulsa King,” suggesting Stallone doesn’t see it as a capstone to his career so much as just the thing he’s doing right now.

For a window into Stallone’s world that is carefully avoided in “Sly,” Pamela Anderson’s Netflix documentary, which came out earlier this year, offers a glimpse.

Stallone, she says, once offered her a condo and a Porsche to be his No. 1 girl. “And I said, ‘Does that mean there’s a No. 2?’ Uh-uh. And he goes, ‘That’s the best offer you’re gonna get, honey — you’re in Hollywood now.’”

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'SLY'

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for some language)

Running time: 1:35

How to watch: On Netflix Friday

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