The Apprentice

Just as with Oliver Stone’s political films, Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi has delivered an undeniably engaging and deeply disturbing biopic on Donald Trump’s rise to corporate power in the late 1970s and into the 1980s with The Apprentice. The title, which is facetiously named after Donald Trump’s reality show, which ran 14 seasons. In this film, Trump (Sebastian Stan) is the apprentice to hot-shot attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).  We see a younger Trump look frazzled and vulnerable, but he longs to be wealthy and powerful. Cohn ends up representing Trump and trains him on a set of rules to combat any politician, government agency, bureaucrat, or anyone else that stands in their way. The three rules are 1) Attack, Attack, Attack. 2) Deny, Deny, Deny, and 3) Never Admit Defeat, Always Claim Winning—which Trump still sets in his alternate reality today. Eventually we see Trump’s arc grow stronger and more egotistical, and eventually we see the student surpass the teacher.

The film is at an elite nightclub where Donald Trump just got access. The nightclub includes some of New York’s heavy hitters, and Trump wants to make an imprint with the upper class. At first, we see Trump struggle with his real estate development, has a weight issue, is socially awkward, and wears ill-fitted suits. He takes a date to the club and attempts to brag to himself; she goes to “power her nose,” only to never return. Trump ends up noticing Roy Cohn there and picks his brain on how to be effective. In many ways, this film could have been titled “Trump’s Brain,” just as Karl Rove was Bush’s brain in their rise to power.

Courtesy Briarcliff Entertainment 

Their scenes are quite electrifying and equally unsettling. Jeremy Strong does some skillful things as Roy Cohn, a performance that is both menacing and vulnerable, while Stan also impresses as Trump, and Maria Bakalov brings a sadness to Ivana Trump where we see her go from enabler to victim in Trump’s schemes. Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman (who is also a journalist) wire in a lot of unexpected nuances and make every character three-dimensional. You never feel like you are watching caricatures, impressions, or caricatures. There is an unsettling factor at work knowing the future events of Trump’s rise to power as uncertainty still looms in. Additionally, Sherman and Abbassi cleverly insert a lot of Trump’s insecurities and have built a psychological character study of what drives Trump’s inflated ego. Of course, the film doesn’t approve of Trump’s actions, but at the time, there is a psychological study to be found in Trump’s erratic and domineering behavior.

The film doesn’t sugarcoat either. We see Trump as a horrible husband, parent, rapist, adulterous, cheater, narcissist, and bigot. The film’s final scene of him pitching his book to a ghostwriter about his 1987 best-selling novel The Art of a Deal, which discusses how he doesn’t care about a moral code and raises what is truth. We see his authoritarian tendencies come out in the book and how he is determined to “win” at any cost. Now in 2024, he remains a huge threat to democracy and still hasn’t accepted defeat in the 2020 election. You see Trump’s deceptions in the film examined, and they are still played out in this film. There is an eerie montage of the film where we see Trump’s liposuction and scalp treatment of his hair that feels like it’s the origin of a supervillain in motion.

Courtesy Briarcliff Entertainment

Mainly, Trump spends a lot of his time aiming to get his 58th building of Trump Tower in approved midtown Manhattan. We see Roy Cohn battle tax liens and win many battles fro Trump, including against New York City Mayor Ed Koch in getting a business tax credit. All the best moments in the film mostly involve Cohn and Trump, especially the moments where Roy Cohn keeps his diagnosis of HIV disclosed from Trump, and once Trump finds out, you see how homophobic and paranoid he gets about the illness. We see Roy Cohn’s demise, and Trump continues to become more powerful, deranged, and cunning. Overall, Abbasi builds the film with great energy, and the result is a dramatically satisfying biographical drama. While the film doesn’t vindicate Trump or Cohn in any way, Abbasi does an exceptional job in making them seem more human, which exceeds the approach the mediocre Reagan film did. I’m relieved to see the deftness of Ali Abbasi evoking a fearless political film that reaches an apotheosis that is both unsettling and tragic.

THE APPRENTICE is now playing in theaters