Some Drivel On...Creed

As “Creed” (2015) opens, the young Adonis Johnson, son of the legendary boxer Apollo Creed by way of an extramarital affair, is in a youth detention center. A fight breaks out, affording him the opportunity to foreshadow his future boxing skills, the ones inherently passed down from his father, though the sequence, given its setting and the subsequent scene, when Apollo’s widow Mary Ann (Phylicia Rashad) arrives to take Adonis in, evoke something further – the lack of and the need for a community. That is why even the flash ahead to present day, where adult Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) toils away at a white collar job in the immediate aftermath of taking fights in Mexico feels less like an obvious representation of the thrill being gone than a swift evocation of how The Boardley Financial Group (ick) isn’t the community Adonis is looking for.

No, the community he’s looking for is in Philadelphia, which is where he goes after resigning from The Boardley Financial Group (ick). He finds his community with Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), sure, his pops’s old friend and foe, who Adonis wants to train him, and who will, as he must, eventually come around, from love rather than obligtation. And Adonis finds it in Bianca (Tessa Thompson), The Woman Downstairs, less Adrian than Rihanna, an aspiring hip-hop artist with hearing loss, hashed out in a mini-monologue where Thompson truly goes for the Iggles accent, explaining it’s all about doing what you love for as long as you can, a truth that cuts straight to the heart of “Creed” even as her plight makes you want to stop the movie and listen to Side A of “Run-D.M.C” one last time because, damn man, your hearing might just go one day too and you might have missed your shot. She explains this foible in a scene over cheesesteaks, set at Max’s, a little real life flavor that Coogler smartly injects throughout, particularly later during the training montage which becomes more than merely obligatory with neighborhood motorbikes accompanying Adonis on his run through city streets.

The first time I watched “Creed”, I yearned just as much for a movie called “Bianca”, though watching “Creed” again made me yearn for a movie, any movie, where it’s just Jordan and Thompson, so crackling and natural is their chemistry. Verbally, dynamically, charismatically, they go toe to toe like Adonis and Pretty Boy Ricky Conlan (Anthony Bellew) go toe to toe in the climactic fight, more peacefully though, mostly, never to more stunning effect than when Adonis tries to decide, upon orders by Conlan’s people as a condition for finalizing their epic bout, whether to take the surname Creed. Coogler frames this scene so that Adonis and Bianca are in bed but sitting up, him braiding her hair, deliberately feminizing an otherwise masculine pugilist, like he’s meeting her in the middle, and which she also does with him throughout. He’s in her corner, and she’s in his, and when he expresses doubt about taking his dad’s name, her telling him what he needs to know with repetition of the word “right” is like the cadence of a coach to a boxer between rounds. It’s an incredibility intimate, deep scene, bridging their worlds and genders, signifying how he is emotionally letting her all the way in.

The fight is the film’s climax, of course, just as it was in every “Rocky” movie before it, including the original, which Adonis vs. Conlan quotes from liberally, not just in Bill Conti’s famed music cue at a dramatic moment, but in how Adonis seems to gain strength by not putting up his hands – even as you keep hearing the corner cry out for him to do so – and taking constant punches to the face, classic Balboa, man. It’s all thrilling stuff. But like the rest of the movie, Coogler adds crucial texture to this fight by giving Rocky Balboa his own fight outside in the ring in the form of cancer. If that sounds maudlin, it does not come off that way because of how Stallone has Rocky meet the diagnosis with a small, sad smile, as if humored by the cyclical nature of the universe. His verbal explanation is mostly superfluous, just the character’s penchant for babbling, as the split-second in which Stallone softly holds his porkpie hat to his chest communicates everything, a man who is watching his life flash before his eyes. He tries to keep it secret, but Adonis makes him spill it and convinces (forces) his mentor to face the disease head on. And if Rocky is introduced alone, running an Italian restaurant no one seems to visit, chatting to the spirit of his wife in the graveyard, he finds a sense of community too.

The original “Rocky” ended ringside, but “Creed” goes one scene further, returning to the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum where so many mornings ago a younger Rocky first ascended in side-clenching pain and then later took several steps at a time as if he had wings on his feet. Now, older, feebler, he needs help to ascend, which Adonis is there to give. If that’s all it was, the scene would be incredibly moving. But these steps, of course, are as famous in pop culture, like the Rocky statue itself, which is glimpsed earlier in the movie when Adonis visits, using a real thing based on a movie in a movie based on the movie that brought about the real thing, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, inviting us all in to the share the moment, connective tissue to the franchise’s considerable history, a sense of belonging for characters and viewers alike.

Creed

The last entry into the illimitable “Rocky” franchise was less a genuine movie than a shameless trip down memory lane, a pandering attempt to re-create the original in order to engender an apology for the grotesque fifth installment. This speaks directly to the franchise’s fraught nature with its own history, each of the film’s five sequels becoming more and more weighed down by the original. Rocky’s life and world was ostensibly always changing, but the ensuing films rarely felt any different, never engaging with the series’ context in any meaningful way other than as a means to get their protagonist back into the ring for a concluding rumble. Ryan Coogler’s “Creed”, however, while created very much in the image of the first “Rocky”, finally employs the series’ copious amount of history as a genuine ally rather than a narrative crutch in forcing the titular character (Michael B. Jordan), son of the series’ great Apollo, to, above all else, grapple with his heritage, forging his own identity even as he reluctantly embraces his roots.

It’s notable that this is both the first story of the “Rocky” series not bear its primary character’s namesake and not to have been written by the man who made that character iconic – Sylvester Stallone. (It was written by Coogler and Aaron Covington.) He’s still here, of course, in that familiar pork-pie hat with the iconic stumbling voice, but Stallone is more than willing to simply offer support, ceding the spotlight to Jordan. And Jordan is remarkable. Playing the conspicuously named Adonis Johnson, tellingly rescued in a pre-credits sequence from a juvenile home by Apollo’s widow, Mary Anne (an exemplary Phylicia Rashad), he nimbly walks the wire between blistering Apollo-ish arrogance and the forceful stoicism of the woman who raised him. Though this marks him as his own person, his legacy still hangs over to him so forcefully that he rejects the privilege his name has afforded and left la-la-land for Philadelphia.

Legacy is not only Adonis’s burden, of course; it is also Rocky’s. The real-life Rocky statue is seen in the film as being a product of the on-screen character’s legacy, as close as this otherwise earnest film gets to meta commentary. And the history Rocky has with Adonis’s dad is the precise reason he decides to train him. So many of these Philly-set sequences fall right in line with the series’ tried and true formula – Adonis receiving an improbable title shot against an unbelievable opponent through a series of fortuitous circumstances, welcoming the challenge, stumbling, and then rising to it. But Coogler relays this formula with freshness. Rocky gets his young protégé out of Mighty Mick’s Gym for a new place, evoking the change in Philadelphia, shifting from Italian-American to African-American, but how in so many ways that underdog spirit has remained intact.

More than just injecting the formula with acute flavor, however, “Creed” gets the smallest details just right, investing heavily in its characters. Look no further than Adonis’s obligatory love interest, Bianca (Tessa Thompson, effortlessly charismatic to the nines), a local musician. Where the immortal Adrian was shy, Bianca is self-possessed, a perfect match for someone as confident, if kind-hearted, as her pugilist paramour. Their few dialogue scenes crackle with so much wit and joy you wish there were more of them. She doesn’t just react to Adonis, she challenges him.

In maybe the movie’s most indelible scene, Adonis points out her dual hearing aids, allowing her to explain that she is on her way to becoming deaf, and already getting ready for it, doing what she loves for as long as she can. It’s a beautiful moment that works all on its own, delivered by Thompson not with pity or schmaltz, but someone who has already made a hard-won peace with it. Yet even more than the moment it comes to emblemize the plight of a boxer too; a life, as Adonis is constantly warned, that can take so much away even as it’s giving so much. Rocky himself is allowed to function as living proof of this. He may have a statue, but he’s also hauling carts of produce for his little trattoria out of the back of a van, talking and moving slower, wheezing, coughing, finally, truly acting his age. Even if you wish the movie pushed at his idea harder, it’s still commendable.

The boxing scenes themselves also make clear the toil that time in the ring can take while simultaneously illustrating their admitted pull. The first fight is a technical marvel, rendered in a breathless single take, filmed exclusively inside the ring, moving and prowling with the fighters, the refusal to cut evoking the inability to escape once that bell tolls, the unrelenting barrage brought home with acute sense of realism that truly lets you feel what it means to box. Even so, it does not skimp on the endorphin rush Adonis feels, the reason why someone would give so much in the moment to lose so much more in the end; it’s a primal if complicated power that Coogler and his cinematographer Maryse Alberti implicitly capture.

The climactic bout, frankly, is a little less invigorating than this first one, a bit more akin to its predecessors, what with the music explicitly quoting Bill Conti at a pivotal moment which shamelessly but very, very successfully rouses all holy hell. Still, you’ve become so invested in this person and these people by this point, that you turn a blind eye to those strings being pulled – at least, I did, and so what? And anyway, Coogler is intelligent enough to know the fight is not what makes or breaks Adonis. Look no further than his patriotic boxing trunks, emblazoned with both “Creed” and “Johnson”; he enters the ring having already re-claimed his heritage even in carving out a name for himself. It’s the same feat achieved by Coogler. This film fits snugly into the series, but Coogler makes “Creed” his own.