Director Ali Abbasi’s breakthrough came by way of Border, a singularly strange fairy tale about a troll who stumbles upon a child trafficking ring while working as a Swedish customs agent. Six years later, there’s little trace of that same eccentricity or ambition in his latest offering, The Apprentice, which is Abbasi’s take on a different kind of monster movie; the film tells the origin story of a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), flipping the dynamic of its title to track the pivotal influence that ruthless power player and political fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) had on the future tycoon President.
It’s a movie that was bound to be made one day, and Abbasi directs it with similar predictability, veering so rarely from glossy prestige drama mode that you’d be forgiven for forgetting he directed it at all. In fact, save for a couple of horror-adjacent scenes late in the narrative and some sporadically applied stylistic flourishes (’80s-style opening titles and a crackly VHS aesthetic), it all proceeds more or less anonymously.
Hardly groundbreaking stuff, then, but The Apprentice is a serviceable effort at the inevitable. Sebastian Stan puts in a decent Trump impersonation, nailing that characteristic head tic and beaked pout, but it’s in the ways he doesn’t seem like the Trump we know that gives the film a compelling beginning. When The Apprentice opens in the 1970s — lively archival footage submerging us in NYC’s “Fear City” era — it finds Donald insecure and submissive in the presence of his tyrannical father Fred (Martin Donovan). In short, the film’s young subject feels like a human being in this opening section — an alien but welcome key change given how two-dimensional the real Trump has sought to present himself ever since.
Resisting the urge to parody gives The Apprentice a seriousness that’s unusual for depictions of the oft-lampooned Trump. It’s a shrewd choice, one that allows the movie to avoid undermining itself, given that it seeks to illuminate the monstrosity of its other central character (played with appropriate intensity by the always-intense Strong). A former attack dog for the McCarthy prosecution in the ’50s and subsequent dirty trickster for the Nixon campaign, Cohn both intimidates and impresses the directionless young Trump — who is searching for a way out of his father’s shadow — when they meet at a New York member’s club one night. For much of the film, Strong projects depressingly familiar Teflon arrogance, but there are notes of pure menace in his perma-tanned Cohn, too, like the moment he recounts the bloodthirsty zeal with which he pushed for the death penalty for mother-of-two Ethel Rosenberg during his time as a government prosecutor. DOP Kasper Tuxen shoots the admission like straight horror, Strong’s face illuminated from underneath as he looms towards a perturbed Donald out of the shadows of a dimly lit room. Though The Apprentice later features a graphic, Frankenstein-esque scene of scalp-stapling surgery, it’s this moment that stands out as the film’s most disturbing.
Tracking the corrupting influence such a monster has on Trump is what The Apprentice is most interested in: it charts Donald’s gradual metamorphosis, from his “humble” beginnings as a landlord who collected the rent himself into the belligerent brand he learnt to build under Cohn’s tutelage. As the movie deftly demonstrates, nearly all of the tactics we’ve come to associate with Trump can be traced back to his mentor, whose rhetorical flourishes (“They should call it the Unfair Housing Act!”) and three rules for survival he brazenly lifts as his own. (Those rules: 1. Attack, attack, attack, 2) Admit nothing, deny everything, and 3. No matter what happens, claim victory and never admit defeat.)
It’s an enlightening connection to make, but elsewhere, The Apprentice focuses too much on drawing more superficial links between the past and the present. As the movie progresses, most of its energies feel channelled into trying to elicit knowing smirks from the audience: whether namechecking future pivotal figures (Roger Stone, Rupert Murdoch) with brisk cameos or cramming in pointless allusions to Trump’s well-known quirks of personality (his love of musicals, his predilection for words like “loser”), the movie strains to foreshadow the minutiae of our current moment. There are some subtler and more dramatically potent moments of reference in Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay, such as the one in which Cohn, incensed by just how much his protégée has learnt from him, paraphrases a line once used to cut down McCarthy: “At long last, have you no sense of decency?” By and large, though, the movie’s many winks are empty and overdone — meaning that, by the time we’re watching someone come up with the title for Trump’s hagiographic memoir (“The Art of the Deal”) in real-time, the movie starts to feel more than a little smugly executed.
The Apprentice does attempt some meaningful exploration of Donald’s psyche — a Trump family tragedy, a bout of sexual aggression towards wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) — but these never go deep enough. The result is that the film’s focus, which leans closer in Donald’s favour the longer it goes on, feels misplaced. That’s because, throughout The Apprentice‘s runtime, it’s always the master and not the student who remains the more compelling figure. Maybe it’s simply because there’s still some intrigue left in Cohn, who hasn’t suffered from the excess publicity his protegee has for the last interminable while. But it’s also true that there is some pathos to be found in his particular brand of hypocrisy. A power-broker who once had half of New York City in his pocket and a lawyer so powerful he insisted he instruct his clients, Cohn was also a slur-spouting, closeted gay man who would eventually die of AIDS alone, abandoned by so many of his hangers-on. These contradictions make for a far more interesting psychological subject than Trump’s run-of-the-mill narcissism, and Strong — though limited by The Apprentice‘s lack of imagination — does manage to nudge the movie’s ceiling a little higher with his arresting performance.
The Apprentice’s stumbling block is perhaps one it couldn’t avoid, given its subject: the more recognisable (read: shallower) Donald becomes, the less interested Trump-fatigued audiences are going to be, and so the weaker the film’s centre becomes. Over-exposure to Trump is the movie’s near-fatal flaw, but it’s just about rescued by Strong’s more grimly engrossing and thornily complex Cohn — a much-needed presence in a film that often insists on proceeding in the most obvious manner.
