What I found most impressive about Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival to rapturous applause but has since struggled to find distribution, is that it made me feel empathy for Donald Trump and the mentor who shaped him, the notorious lawyer and “fixer” Roy Cohn. It helped me past my own long-simmering disgust with Trump and recognize him as a fellow human being. A flawed human being—sure. A morally compromised human being—yup. And absolutely a human being whose ambitions ultimately led him into a world in which nothing mattered other than his own self-aggrandizement, a human being who would throw anyone under the bus who no longer served his needs, a human being who would rape his wife—but a human being nevertheless.

If Trump supporters bothered to see the film—which they likely won’t—they would probably write it off as an anti-Trump hack job designed to damage his reputation. As Trump said through his spokesman Steven Cheung, “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked” (he also, of course, described it as “election interference,” which is such an absurd accusation that it doesn’t merit rebuttal). Those who loathe Trump will certainly delight in digging into every scandalous aspect of the film, salivating at the big-screen dramatizations of everything they hate about the man and congratulating themselves for being right about his noxiousness. But, the film’s fundamental essences lies somewhere in the middle. It certainly reinforces the perception that Trump is an awful person, but it also dramatizes in a humane and meaningful way how he got there. If you believe (as I do) that all of us have the fundamental, God-given potential for good, then you have to concede that Trump’s life could have gone a different direction. But, it didn’t, and The Apprentice shows us how, turning Trump into a kind of Nixon-era Barry Lyndon (the film could just as well have been titled The Luck of Donald Trump).

Rather than trying to tell the entirety of Trump’s life, the screenplay by journalist-turned-screenwriter/producer Gabriel Sherman (The Loudest Voice) focuses primarily on Trump’s ascendence to the top of the New York City real estate market in the 1970s and ’80s under the tutelage of Cohn, who first gained notoriety as an assistant to Joseph McCarthy in helping prosecute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. When we first meet Trump (Sebastian Stan), he is a man in his early 30s who has already established himself as the heir apparent to his vicious father’s real estate company, The Trump Organization, but is still finding his footing. He is wealthy and insecure and looking to get out from under his father’s long, dark shadow, which is how he is drawn into Cohn’s orbit. Forced to collect rent checks door to door in the Trump Organization’s tenement buildings, the younger Trump is very clear under his father’s thumb, a position from which he begins to extricate himself by hiring Cohn (Jeremy Strong) to defend the company against federal charges of racial discrimination in their leasing practices. It is at this point that Cohn teaches Trump three vital lessons that still form the bedrock from which he operates: (1) attack, attack, attack; (2), admit nothing, deny everything; and (3) no matter what happens, claim victory and never admit defeat. These three interrelated tactics are brought together by the single most important rule that Cohn instills in the impressionable Trump: “You create your own reality. Truth is a malleable thing.”

Armed with Cohn’s morally vacuous, but insidiously effective life lessons, Trump rises quickly, eventually eclipsing his father as he becomes the face of New York City wealth and prestige. The film tracks through familiar incidents in Trump’s life: his meeting, courting, and eventually marrying his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova); the death of his alcoholic older brother, Freddy (Charlie Carrick), who was ostracized for choosing to be an airline pilot rather than joining the family business; and the building of Trump Tower (a grand success) and Trump’s Atlantic City casino (a major disaster). With each moment that Trump becomes wealthier and more powerful, the more he begins to sideline Cohn, who had earlier pulled his strings. Trump’s treatment of Cohn is a metonym for his fundamentally transactional approach to relationships: Once Cohn could no longer benefit him in a substantial way, he was no longer important and therefore not worthy of his time. The fact that Cohn had become sick with AIDS, something he denied until the very end of his life, only strengthened Trump’s resolve to keep him at arm’s length, which the film powerfully conveys at the end by cross-cutting shots of Cohn’s funeral with images of Trump getting liposuction and having his scalp surgically altered to hide his bald spot—a portrait of vanity trumping friendship.

As the young Trump, Sebastian Stan is duly impressive, capturing the vocal cadences and physicality of an over-familiar media personality that never feels like an impersonation. The danger of films like this, ones that recreate recent history with figures who are still alive and well, is that they often end up feeling like an extended Saturday Night Live skit (this was particularly true of Oliver Stone’s misguided 2008 George W. Bush biopic W). However, Stan is so good at conveying the essence of Trump’s ambitions and slowly decaying sense of humanity that he transcends mimicry. Even better is Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, who he plays with a dead-eyed sense of power and entitlement that slowly cracks and bleeds away as his social and political standing loses traction. Even more so than Trump, The Apprentice makes us feel for Cohn as a flawed human being who, when confronted with a fatal disease, found that his tripart power play of attacking, lying, and denying had no effect on his imminent mortality. Someday, Donald Trump, for all his bluster, will learn the same hard lesson.

Copyright © 2024 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Briarcliff Entertainment