Donald Trump doesn’t want Americans to see The Apprentice, and with good reason—it’s a bona fide supervillain origin story. Director Ali Abbasi’s much-buzzed-about film—premiering in theaters Oct. 11, following a special sneak peek at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival—can at times be frustratingly clunky and on the nose.
Even so, it’s an incisive primer on the relationship with Roy Cohn that made the 45th President of the United States who he is today. Which is to say, it lays out the gory details regarding the source of his egomania, greed, ambition, vanity, sociopathy, and heartless rapey-ness, the last of which comes to the fore in a brutal assault of his first wife Ivana.
The film to make the MAGA universe explode with rage, The Apprentice is a capitalist riff on Pygmalion by way of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with Cohen (Succession’s Jeremy Strong) the malevolent doctor and Trump (Sebastian Stan) his monster, complete (at tale’s end) with a shot of the latter’s head being crudely stapled together in order to erase his growing bald spot.
Abbasi’s tale introduces us to Trump in the late ’70s as a neophyte real estate developer operating under the enormous shadow of his mean titan father Fred (Martin Donovan). Despite his relatively slight stature, however, he’s become the youngest person to ever receive an invite to join the members-only NYC hot spot Le Club. There, he locks eyes with Cohn, whose glare is so blatantly Satanic that it’s pointless for Gabriel Sherman’s script to later have Trump call him “the devil.”
Though Trump is a small-timer at this point, Cohn (who’s surrounded on their first date by various mobsters) correctly identifies him as a dreamer determined to do whatever it takes to be Rockefeller-grade rich, as well as something of an empty vessel into which he can pour all his evil. Pour he does, gradually taking Trump under his wing and indoctrinating him in the ways of unabashed cutthroat nastiness.
To succeed, Cohn instructs, Trump must follow three surefire rules: attack, attack, attack; deny everything and admit nothing; and never acknowledge defeat and always claim victory. The Apprentice doesn’t make it difficult to see these principles as the foundation of contemporary’s Trump’s ethos, and Cohn proves their effectiveness to his eager and malleable protégé by saving the Trump business’ behind in a court case about discriminatory housing practices. To do this, Cohn uses one of his favorite tactics—blackmail—because, as he counsels Trump in a speech about sports, the key to success is knowing that you have to “play the man, not the ball.”
Cohn’s entire playbook is summed up by his pronouncement, “None of it matters except winning,” and if The Apprentice isn’t subtle about having the infamous prosecutor and Nixon lawyer spout such pearls of wicked wisdom, it nonetheless benefits from Strong’s tremendous performance as the wheeler-dealer.
Self-interested and generous, brazen and cunning, physically slight and intensely intimidating, Strong’s Cohn is a scary creep precisely because he’s not shackled by rules, laws, or morality, and his willingness to stoop to any low to get the job done is epitomized by the fact that, despite being obviously gay, he uses others’ homosexuality as a weapon against them while hiding his own sexual orientation behind closed doors. He’s a demon who wraps his vileness in the American flag and attendant protestations of patriotism, which is, according to him, precisely why he sought the death penalty for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
With a helmet of blond hair and a collection of designer suits, Trump comes across as a vainglorious idiot who discovers that the keys to the kingdom have nothing to do with intelligence, kindness, or generosity; rather, it’s all about talking big, acting bigger, and continually tripling down on those boasts, be it in the courtroom, the boardroom, or in the press (such as when he wages a PR battle against New York’s mayor Ed Koch). By making grand gestures and not taking no for an answer, he woos fashion model Ivana (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’s Maria Bakalova), whose own materialism makes her powerless to resist Trump’s courtship. The Apprentice mocks Trump at regular intervals, such as having him fall down in Aspen after trying to charm Ivana. However, it largely views him not as a buffoon but, instead, as a nascent cretin who just needed the right father figure to mold him into a tyrant.
The Apprentice makes its points about Cohn’s surrogate daddy-dearest role painfully clear, and it’s similarly inelegant in an office scene featuring Trump expounding upon his presidential ambitions and then hearing about Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again” slogan. Abbasi shoots his action in a TV-grade 4:3 aspect ratio and with a low-resolution filter that makes it resemble a 1980s VHS recording, and had he leaned further into such stylization, he might have alleviated the proceedings’ intermittent gracelessness.
As it stands, those scattered moments undercut the film’s generally astute portrait of its subject, who’s embodied by Stan with a deftness to match Strong’s superb turn. Only occasionally does the actor outright mimic Trump’s distinctive verbal cadences, and when he does, it’s both for comedic effect and to signal the protagonist’s transformation into a louder, brasher variation of Cohn—and, in effect, the epitome of ’80s excess. For the most part, he shrewdly casts Trump’s vapidity and cruelty as an extension of his narcissism.
Speaking of cruelty, The Apprentice rakes its subject over the coals for his cold treatment of his brother Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick)—whose death is partially his fault, compelling him to try to wash the figurative blood off his hands—and, worse, for his use-her-and-lose-her callousness toward Ivana. That culminates with a fight sparked by Trump telling his wife that he no longer desires her, and which ends with the industrialist, infuriated by Ivana slandering him as “bald,” sexually assaulting her in their apartment’s grand foyer.
As with his subsequent betrayal of Cohn, whose rules he steals as his own for The Art of the Deal, this rape is a scathing indictment of Trump’s character and worldview. If Abbasi’s film doesn’t say anything particularly novel about either, it still manages to damn the Don as he would his adversaries: with no restraint or remorse.
