The Featherweight

The Featherweight is a 2023 American biographical sports drama film directed by Robert Kolodny, written by Steve Loff, and starring James Madio as professional boxer Willie Pep. It premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2023.

Plot
Set in 1964, a direct cinema camera crew follows Willie Pep, retired two-time world featherweight boxing champion. Now living in Hartford, Connecticut with his wife Linda, an aspiring actress half his age, a drug-addled son, his Italian immigrant parents, mounting debts and the feeling of faded glory ... Pep decides to make a return to the ring.

Cast

 * James Madio as Willie Pep
 * Ruby Wolf as Linda Pep
 * Keir Gilchrist as Billy Papaleo Jr.
 * Stephen Lang as Bill Gore
 * Ron Livingston as Bob Kaplan
 * Lawrence Gilliard Jr. as Sandy Saddler
 * Shari Albert as Fran
 * Imma Aiello as "Mama" Papaleo

Production
Filming occurred in Hartford, Connecticut in late 2021, utilizing real locations from Willie Pep's life. Kolodny cast both professional actors and locals to heighten the nonfiction aesthetic of the film. Aside from Robert Kolodny, who spent the years as a documentary cinematographer on films like Procession and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the team behind the film involved several celebrated filmmakers from the documentary community, including Steve James as executive producer and Robert Greene as editor.

Reception
The film received a five minute standing ovation at its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. It received critical praise with indiewire comparing the cinéma vérité to John Cassavetes and Dana Thomas calling it a "mash-up Mean Streets and Raging Bull " in The Style Files. The New Yorker's Richard Brody called it an "intricately detailed mockumentary of the 1964 end times of the boxer Willie Pep's career; eerily close incarnations of the era, an undertow of trauma behind the drive, vanity behind the ferocity". It went on to be selected as the closing film of the 54th International Film Festival of India and the showcase screening of the Museum of the Moving Image's First Look Festival.

The film has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on five reviews.