Arguably the most noteworthy accomplishment of the recent Finnish boxing biopic The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki was its pointed subversion of the genre’s usual macho pieties, centering instead on a diminutive boxer who could care less about winning a title fight, if it meant being able to return to the woman he loved and the quiet life he had before. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there’s Chuck Wepner, the brash central figure of Philippe Falardeau’s new boxing biopic Chuck. Right off the bat, with Wepner (Liev Schreiber) boasting in voiceover about his connection to Sylvester Stallone’s boxing classic Rocky—he was the inspiration for the iconic boxer, after Stallone saw him almost beat Muhammad Ali in a heavyweight title fight in 1975—one can tell we’re in the presence of a character who believes in winning, especially as a way of personal validation.
Falardeau’s film is hardly an endorsement of Wepner’s machismo, however; you could say that Chuck undermines boxing-movie tropes in stealthier ways than Juho Kuosmanen did in Olli Mäki. Take Wepner as a boxer himself, to start. In his Bayonne, New Jersey, hometown, he’s popularly known as “The Bleeder,” mostly because, as an athlete, he was celebrated more for his ability to absorb a lot of blows than for his ability to beat people up in a ring. That startling physical resilience is what led to him being able to last for a full 15 rounds against Ali on March 24, 1975, before Ali finally knocked Wepner down and cemented his victory. Few showed such toughness against The Greatest, and surely that’s what attracted Stallone in conceiving of Rocky Balboa.
Falardeau and screenwriters Schreiber, Jeff Feuerzeig, Jerry Stahl, and Michael Cristofer, however, are ultimately less interested in Wepner as a boxer than as a celebrity—at least, in his own mind. The second half of Chuck chronicles Wepner’s life after the release of Rocky, and, at least as the film tells it, his is a classic case of a man who allowed fame to go to his head, flaming out in spectacular fashion through a combination of alcoholism, drug addiction, marital infidelity and the familial troubles that resulted from both. The irony of Wepner’s rise and fall is that he didn’t exactly rise to great heights in the first place. He puffed himself up mostly by hammering home that tenuous connection to Stallone’s fictional creation, and ultimately kept trying to hold onto his 15 minutes of fame, even as most people around him had long forgotten about it.