Film of the Week: ‘The Apprentice’ – The Donald Trump origin story

What – or who – turned young real-estate executive Donald Trump into the tangerine menace who just refuses to go away and could be on his way to winning a second term next month?

This is the question at the heart of The Apprentice, the English-language debut from Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (Border, Holy Spider) – a conventional but compelling biopic scripted by journalist Gabriel Sherman, which focuses on the formative years of the man who would one day worm himself into the White House.

Set in New York between the 1970s and 1980s, we meet The Donald (Sebastian Stan) in a Manhattan club, where he attempts to impress his date by listing some of the guests there. He’s awkward, crippled with daddy issues, and struggling to make a name for himself in the world of real estate.

In other words, he’s in dire need of guidance.

That comes when he is summoned to the table of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a ruthless lawyer and cutthroat fixer who is amused by Trump.

“I like this kid – I feel sorry for him.”

Cohn takes him under this wing, fostering a disciple-mentor dynamic, and imparts the three golden rules to live by – because “everybody wants to suck a winner’s cock.”

Rule 1: “Attack, attack, attack.”

Rule 2: “Admit nothing, deny everything.”

Rule 3 (the most important rule): “Claim victory and never admit defeat.”

All sound a bit too familiar for comfort?

Thus begins an odd couple chronicle that lays the foundations of an empire built on lies and deception. Cohn helps Trump and his heartless real estate baron father Fred (Martin Donovan) by solving their legal woes regarding the Fair Housing Act, and assists his protégé in renovating the crumbling Commodore Hotel into Trump Tower.

But as these stories so often go, especially when it comes to the dark arts, Mephistopheles is soon overtaken by his eager student.

Abbasi zeroes in on the early stages of Trump’s ascension by showing him grow stronger as Cohn weakens – in large part due to an AIDS diagnosis. This parallel trajectory isn’t particularly subtle but laudably avoids easy caricature, as the director isn’t interested in presenting these people as monstrous – rather as exploitative parasites who create their own realities in which there are only “killers and losers”.

Stan is excellent as Trump, convincingly taking the character from obsequious wannabe to out-of-touch gremlin. After his Silver Bear-winning turn in A Different Man, the actor dons more prosthetics but dodges any kind of cheap mimicry by nailing the gestures and slowly drip-feeding more tics and verbal quirks as the runtime progresses. And as the amoral narcissism builds. The fact that Stan is able to capture all the vocal and physical mannerisms and it not be just another grotesque impersonation – especially after years of countless comedians doing their best Don – is a welcome surprise.

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His skill is matched by Strong’s throughout. The Succession actor manages to give layers to a complicated character: Cohn is a loathsome ghoul who boasts about how he orchestrated the death penalty for Ethel Rosenberg, but also a self-loathing homosexual who realises he has unwittingly unleashed a monster. The way in which the actor manages to find pathos in the irredeemable is one of the film’s greatest strengths.

While it mostly deals in known facts – frustratingly, there isn’t much we don’t know about Trump these days, making it a challenging ask to say something new about Agent Orange – The Apprentice works best as a performance-propelled portrait of so-called American exceptionalism.

It’s not a great film, but a compulsively watchable one, destined to polarize even those who despise Trump.

It will be berated for not being enough of a hit job by some; not political enough considering the current climate by others.

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While there is no risk that it will endear audiences to Trump, who is portrayed as a disloyal and incompetent shyster, its timing is an unavoidable talking point considering Trump’s second presidential campaign – meaning that its apolitical nature may be the biggest and most controversial rub.

That said, there’s the contentious rape scene in which Trump assaults his wife Ivana (an excellent but annoyingly sidelined Maria Bakalova). This inclusion must have been high on the list of grievances for the Trump team, who vowed to sue and get the film banned.

The alleged 1989 incident of spousal rape was previously detailed in the couple’s divorce proceedings. Trump denied and Ivana later refuted the claim ahead of his 2015 presidential campaign. Here, it is shown in unambiguous terms.

“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” the Trump campaign’s Steven Cheung declared after the film’s Cannes premiere.

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For context, at least 25 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct since the 1970s.

Cheung added: “This is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”

If reading that didn’t send shivers down your spine, we don’t know what will.

Will there be the audience for The Apprentice?

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It’s not a guarantee. We’ve been inundated with wall-to-wall coverage of His MAGAsty for the best part of 10 years, and there’s a case to be made that audiences are not willing to shell out to see more of him on the big screen. Still, being able to watch The Apprentice was not a given, as so many studios (Netflix, Amazon, Warner Bros., Universal, A24, the lot) declined to distribute it before Briarcliff and StudioCanal came along. So we should be thankful it’s on the big screen in the first place – and that Trump and his cronies never managed to censor or ban it.

Will The Apprentice open any eyes?

It won’t have much sway when it comes to changing minds. The MAGA crowd will probably stay away, and any curious Trump voters will doubtlessly stand by their champion and cry “election interference”. As previously mentioned, those opposed to Trump and all he stands for may take issue that Abasi never fully portrays his subject as a moustache-twirling villain. However, the director was never out to make a preach-to-the-choir takedown; without venturing into deep psychological territory, Abasi rather boldly goes for a straightfoward period snapshot that addresses the masculine insecurities inherent to the elite and which allows audiences to see Trump for who he has always been. A lost and ignorant boy who came from privilege and still needed to grift, exploit and cheat his way to the top.

Plus, Trump couldn’t grow a moustache if he tried.

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Please stop picturing it. No one needs an extra nightmarish crouton on this catastrophic shit-salad.

With a bit more than three weeks to go before one of the most important US presidential elections in modern times, no one knows what the penultimate month of 2024 has in store for us. Will the US choose sanity or dive straight back into four more years under a man who has vowed to be a dictator on the first day of his second term?

What is certain is that the Trumpian menace isn’t going to suddenly disappear should he lose the election.

That, and if Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong’s names are part of the conversation during awards season, you can bet that the amoral scammer-in-chief will bullishly claim some credit.

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The Apprentice premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is out in theatres now.