Is 'Rocky' a boxing movie? Furthermore, is 'I Play Rocky' a Rocky movie?

“I Play Rocky” is a more or less un-spoilable movie. Sure, hypothetically, a very young child, or a person who recently awoke from a 50-year coma, could wander into a screening of the new film and wonder, “Will they allow this unknown named Sylvester Stallone to play the part of Rocky Balboa?” and “If so, will they finish making the movie?” and “If so, will it be well received or spawn any sequels?”

But, for 99.8 percent of adult humans, and for 99.99 percent of adult humans who might be into boxing enough to be reading an article on a boxing-dedicated website right now, the plot of “I Play Rocky” cannot be spoiled.

I suppose, however, that there are a handful of moments along the way that can be spoiled. And, having seen the movie at a preview screening last month, I’m about to spoil one of them. You’ve been warned.

Midway through the picture, when John G. Avildsen, portrayed here by Jay Duplass, is under consideration to direct “Rocky,” and is discussing the prospect with Stallone (Anthony Ippolito) and producers Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne) and Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell), he suggests something that, in all my decades of watching and rewatching films in the Rocky franchise, I have never once stopped to consider: This movie they’re possibly about to make is, according to Avildsen, not a boxing movie.

This is not the same as positing that “Die Hard” either is or is not a Christmas movie. You’ll find very fine people on both sides of that one.

But “Rocky”? Not a boxing movie? How many Spider Rico headbutts did Avildsen have to absorb to come up with that nonsense?

What Avildsen meant, of course, was that, to him, “Rocky” was not first and foremost a boxing movie. It was a human drama about this decent, desperate, damaged man getting an opportunity, through boxing, to make something of himself. It was a romance movie and a Thanksgiving movie and a bicentennial movie and a Philadelphia movie and, yes, of course it was a boxing movie too. It opens with a boxing match and closes with a boxing match, after all, and there are gym scenes and training montages along the way. But in Avildsen’s mind, or at least in the dramatized version of Avildsen’s mind, boxing shouldn’t get top billing.