There’s a majestic, bitter irony to “Creed,” Ryan Coogler’s stirring, heartfelt, tough-minded, and insightful reboot of the “Rocky” franchise. It’s a satisfying genre movie, and it meets the requirements of the series, but it’s very much a personal and passionate film. It’s Coogler’s—he directed it, wrote the story, and co-wrote the screenplay with Aaron Covington. It’s as much of a political film as is Coogler’s other feature, the independently produced drama “Fruitvale Station.” And—as is entirely normal for a young filmmaker (amazingly, Coogler is only twenty-nine)—“Creed,” despite the studio standards and norms that it meets, is an even more accomplished, wide-ranging, and analytical film than his remarkable début.
Ingeniously, Coogler has transformed “Rocky”—the modern cinematic myth that, perhaps more than any other, endures as a modern capitalist Horatio Alger story of personal determination and sheer will—into a vision of community and opportunity, connections and social capital, family and money. It begins in a modern-day Hell, a juvenile-detention center in Los Angeles that’s run with the terrorizing martial authority of a prison, and focusses on a modern victim of that broken system—young Adonis Johnson (Alex Henderson), an orphaned teen-ager in the center, who’s involved in a bloody and harrowing fistfight with another, bigger inmate.
Badly beaten but still game, Adonis ends up in solitary, and in a way the movie is over before it starts: the terrifying future at hand is a life of confrontation with monstrously hostile or indifferent authority, a violent struggle to survive while bearing the stigmata of social exclusion. The nationwide crime of the cavalier incarceration of young black men is where the movie begins. Then an angel, a dea ex machina, arrives, in the person of Mary Anne Creed (Phylicia Rashad), Apollo Creed’s widow. She informs Adonis of his true heritage—Apollo, who died before Adonis’s birth, was his biological father—and Mary Anne adopts him.
Suddenly, Adonis is plunged into luxury, raised in a mansion on a gated estate, and he makes the most of it. As an adult (played by Michael B. Jordan), he has a promising job at a bank, where he has just received a promotion—but his passion is boxing, which he pursues as an independent in a minor circuit in Tijuana, where he’s undefeated. Defying Mary Anne’s wishes (she has, of course, seen her husband die in the ring), Adonis quits his job and heads to Philadelphia, in the hope of being trained by his father’s nemesis and friend, Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, of course).
Throughout the movie—foremost, in the tentative first encounters of Adonis and Rocky—scenes that skirt the edge of cliché veer into new light through Coogler’s keen attention to emotional specifics richly endowed with the weight of the past. One of the strengths of his writing and direction—strengths that are greatly reinforced by the performances and the presences of Jordan and Stallone—is the ambivalent force of memory and heritage. From the start of their sentimental yet fraught connection, the director and the actors dramatize the equal likelihood of powerful experiences proving burdensome or energizing, of an enduring pain serving as motivation or as destruction.
Jordan invests Adonis with exactly the volatile mix that Coogler conceived—raw pugnacity, the endurance of punishment, the discipline forged and graces mastered through education and his several jobs (both in the ring and at the desk). The young fighter has sharpened his mind along with his body. He’s Socratically aware of what he doesn’t know, and his quest—to become a professional through submission to the stern tutelage of an experienced teacher—drives the film. As Rocky, Stallone embodies the far side of that quest. Through his own sense of discipline and force of will, he scaled that very mountain only to find, on the other side, the abyss. He’s a widower who owns a small restaurant—Adrian’s, named after his late wife—and he no longer has anything to do with the world of boxing, where he gained his life and then virtually lost it.
Rocky is in mourning, and Coogler finds a resonant cinematic correlate to his mortal thoughts: his solitary talk at the graves of Adrian and her late brother, Paul, which brings to mind iconic scenes from John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln,” in which the future President (Henry Fonda) holds one-sided dialogues with the spirit of Ann Rutledge. Here, Rocky is haunted by death. He’s alive but his soul is among the dead; he seems to have a foot poised over the open grave, and Stallone brings a terse, astral distractedness to the role, a wry wisdom born of pain and a detachment born of masked grief.
Adonis, of course, is his call back to life (“If I fight, you fight”), and in the process he also calls the older man back to his past—to his memories as well as to his connections, to his departed loved ones as well as to friends in the sport, from whom he had long cut himself off. In the process, Rocky, too (no spoilers), will have his own demons, of bitter memories and new physical struggles, to confront.
The harsh visions that Coogler delivers along with the inspirational drama are as much a matter of cinematic invention as of scripted action. It’s all too easy, in the age of Steadicam, for a director to request, and a cinematographer to deliver, long, smooth, and intricate travelling shots that, in the era of tracking rails and cranes, would have been massive feats of industrial craft. (One result of this ubiquitous technique is the blandly showy stunt-cinematography of “Birdman” and “Victoria.”) In “Creed,” Coogler calls upon his cinematographer, Maryse Alberti (a mainstay of independent filmmaking for a quarter century), to create elaborate travelling shots as well, but what they achieve together is no mere stunt or flash—it’s as much a mark of substance as it is of style.
When Adonis, after a rough time of hard training under Rocky’s tutelage, enters the ring for his first big-time bout, Coogler captures the moment in exactly such a bravura take, which follows the fledgling fighter from the dressing room through the crowd into the ring, into his corner, toward the center of the ring to hear the referee’s instructions and to touch gloves with his opponent, and then to face the music for the entire duration of the first round. Through Alberti’s virtuosity, Coogler captures the magic moment of transformation from potential to kinetic energy, from preparation to execution, from near-amateur to true professional.
There’s no relief for the fighter in the relentless exposure of the ring, where every instant is a level of punishment that few mortals can bear. (The existential burden of time in the ring gets its famous workout in the sad story of Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan boxing while F. Scott Fitzgerald wrongly kept time.) The boxer’s heat of defiant agony is matched, in this great scene, by Jordan’s own. Whatever the actor had to do in order to master even the simulation of a boxer’s skills must have been the result of intensive discipline and exertion veering toward Adonis’s own, and Coogler films the actor with the same sense of wonder, admiration, and care from across the divide of physical punishment.
“Creed” is an intensely physical film, both in and out of the ring. The movie is filled with tastes and textures, with the paraphernalia of the boxing gym, the feel and tone of apartments and streets, the distinctive touch of doors and clothes, the weighty feel of a world of stuff and a city of asphalt and steel, wood and stone. There’s even an element of physical endurance in the movie’s inevitable but sweetly tender romance, between Adonis and his neighbor Bianca (Tessa Thompson), a singer who’s just beginning to edge upward in the Philadelphia music scene and who’s facing a medical crisis of classical dimensions.
Thompson lends Bianca a grounded yet febrile energy; the actress is persuasive as an independent-minded artist (and Coogler writes the part with the rare trait of inventive whimsy and sudden inspiration sufficient to persuade a viewer of the artistic originality of her temperament). But Bianca plays a crucial function in the movie’s overarching vision: unlike Adonis, who is the son of Apollo Creed, the adoptive son of Mary Anne Creed, and the beneficiary of Rocky Balboa’s experience and contacts, Bianca is truly on her own, trying to make it as an artist on her own. I won’t spoil the story to say what happens, but Coogler makes a clear and harsh point about the difference.
“Creed” begins with a cry for justice, for a society that would rescue every young Adonis from isolation, poverty, and brutality in order to foster their strength and cultivate their incipient spark of genius and originality. It’s a movie about an exceptional young man who has the benefit of an exceptional past and turns it into an exceptional future—and it evokes the young people who are condemned to ordinary neglect, ordinary racism, ordinary incarceration, and who are all the more extraordinary in the force of their endurance. Coogler’s preternaturally mature sense of vast experience gained rapidly at almost unbearable cost is both the artistic power that he brings to the movie and its very subject.
