Anchored by two powerful performances in Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, millionaire personality and former President Donald Trump receives an unexpectedly potent biopic treatment encased beneath the grimy grit of 1970s and 1980s New York City. Filmmaker intent aside, releasing this during an election year just weeks away from 2024’s Election Day was certainly a choice. Tackling material involving a rise to power can always be tricky, especially if we are talking about a real-life figure here. Screenwriter Gabriel Sherman makes plenty of liberties in adapting Trump’s actual story to the big screen, but taken strictly as a piece of entertainment, a disturbing character study begins to emerge. Despite its name being something of a misnomer in terms of the time period this dark drama follows, Ali Abbasi injects The Apprentice with enough unnerving specificity to leave a mark.
From the very first time we glimpse Donald Trump (Stan, Fresh, Captain America: The Winter Soldier) he appears celebrity-obsessed, desperately wanting to fit in among the wealthy upper class. He abandons a female he was with at a club to follow an invitation among the elite—in this case, hotshot attorney Roy Cohn (Strong, Succession, Lincoln), who immediately sees something in the new vice president of the Trump organization. Cohn works closely with Trump to get him out of tricky legal situations. However, their relationship extends far beyond the initial matter. Cohn coaches Trump into greatness, encouraging him to exaggerate from the sidelines. Perhaps most important of all, Cohn teaches Trump the three rules of winning: attack attack attack; deny everything; and never admit defeat.
Stan completely disappears in the role of Donald Trump, playing more reserved in the beginning but still adding flourishes to his performance as we get deeper into the meat of the story. Stan gives quite a transformation that still manages to seep his version of Trump with a cutthroat businessman attitude as he gets further under Cohn’s wing. The obsession with building luxury hotels near Grand Central becomes Trump’s biggest ambition. With the narrative being so focused on Trump’s relationship with Cohn, Jeremy Strong gives an equal amount of screen presence. Having passed from AIDS-related illness, the film explores more of Cohn’s queerness than expected. Although he never seems to admit it, Cohn was clearly gay, making overt references to sex and male appearances, not to mention his actual drug-addled orgy parties.
Expecting some kind of sensationalist parody a la The Wolf of Wall Street will probably lead to much disappointment—whilst both movies feature a wealthy, hugely successful antihero at their core, The Apprentice is far more interested in maintaining a somewhat neutral stance on its “monster.” Even with crafting Trump and its ending as a Darth Vader situation as he slides into his new persona, he still manages to come across somewhat sympathetic in certain scenes. We can see the ticking calculations happening just beneath the surface to add a compelling layer to this character. He struggles with the emotions of losing a family member, forces himself on his wife at one point during a fight, and comes off cold and uncaring when Roy eventually falls ill. The depiction of these events simply feels to be displaying them as they occur, refusing to dive deeper into the motivations or characterization. Instead, the audience must draw their own conclusions.
As with any biopic, some details are embellished—the movie itself tells us that some names have been changed and some interactions “fictionalized” for dramatic purposes. Sherman’s script pulls from all different manner of details, from divorce depositions to the book The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, and even The New York Times reports. Separating fact from fiction doesn’t seem all that important either. As with Netflix’s recent Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story, true elements have been taken and spun for a compelling narrative and wrung for maximum entertainment value. Does it really matter how much was factual? Neither of the two projects ever claimed to be documentaries. More than once, either Trump or other characters bring up the concept of him running for presidential office. He claims that “most politicians are dumb as a rock.” Bringing it up more than once feels a bit misguided in an attempt to wink wink, nudge nudge those watching decades from now.
A disco-fueled soundtrack (including “Yes Sir I Can Boogie” and “I’m Your Boogie Man”) depicts the time period well, and the gritty aesthetics and frequent appearance of sex workers in the streets of New York seem accurate. What will keep this gripping movie in the awards conversation for coming months though are both lead performances. Even Maria Bakalova (Bodies Bodies Bodies, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) excels as the vibrant Ivana Trump. Whatever one’s opinion on Donald Trump may be, there can be no denying that the laser-focused The Apprentice makes for a riveting, if exaggerated, character study.
Learn the ways to make America great again in The Apprentice, now playing in theaters everywhere.
