Richard Crouse

“Sly,” a new, reverent Netflix documentary directed by Thom Zimny, is an authorized look at the life of Sylvester Stallone, through the lens of his two best known characters, resilient boxer Rocky Balboa and blunt-force object John Rambo.

The doc begins as Stallone announces he’s moving house, heading east to New York City from his longtime, opulent west coast home in search of a change of scenery and creative rebirth. As a lifetime of memories and memorabilia—the L.A. house has a truly shocking number of statues and figurines of Rocky and Rambo—is packed away, he reminisces about life, his movies and, in one of the film’s few surprises, his love of polo.

Direct and forthright, he turns on the charm to describe his hardscrabble beginnings in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen with parents Frank and Jackie. He spends a great deal of time on his father, a complicated, abusive man who later in life became jealous of his son’s success, but, strangely, almost no time on his mother who was a celebrity in the 1980s.

That’s just one of many omissions. There’s no mention of his softcore movie “The Party at Kitty and Stud’s,” for instance, but “Sly” is not for completists. As Stallone hopscotches through his filmography, focusing on his three successful franchises, “Rocky,” “Rambo” and “The Expendables,” with little or no mention of the other 75 or so films that fill out his resume, it’s clear he has a more high-minded philosophical job to do.

The Oscar-nominated actor-writer-director-producer attempts to find common ground between his personal story of tenacity and his best-known characters. It’s hard to deny the connection between the underdog Rocky and early Sly, or John Rambo’s survival skill set and Stallone’s ability to stay relevant in Hollywood. It’s a bit of a stretch to see how “The Expendables” fits the mold, but this is Stallone’s world and we’re just visiting.

Better than the tangential links between art and artist is a scene featuring Stallone re-listening to a decades-old interview on a battered old cassette tape. “Rocky,” he says as a young man, “is a character study.” “No, it’s not,” his contemporary self says, “it’s a love story!” It’s a nice and rare moment of self-depreciation that compares and contrasts Stallone in different eras; the heady days of early fame and the more self-reflective present-day version.

More than anything, the remarkably intimate portrait of the larger-than-life Stallone is a study in star power. As he talks about his life. usually looking directly into the camera, the elusive it-factor that made and kept him a star is self-evident. “Sly” may not offer up a lot of new material, but does put a personal and entertaining spin on the familiar stories.