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The Apprentice’s most effective takedown of Donald Trump is how unremarkable it makes him seem. This may render Ali Abbasi’s portrait of the early days of the former president and current presidential candidate a little monotonous, but it makes its point succinctly. A direct line is drawn from Richard Nixon, with his “I’m not a crook” address, to attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), and on to Trump (Sebastian Stan), who he both represented and mentored in the early Seventies.
Cohn had made a comfortable spot for himself in some of the most infamous chapters of modern American history. A (reportedly) closeted gay man, he was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fiercest ally during the “Lavender Scare”, which claimed homosexuality to be as un-American an ideal as communism, and drove countless government workers out of work and towards ruin.
In The Apprentice, we first see Cohn meet Trump at New York’s elitist Le Club, where he agrees to defend him against the Justice Department’s allegations that his real estate company had discriminated against Black tenants. Stan’s performance offers up a well-measured, foetal kind of proto-Trump – all the narcissism and cruelty already in place, but the bloated circus show still in early rehearsals, that personality vacancy instead filled by a queasy eagerness. He jumps up like a starved dog any time he can smell power in the near vicinity.
Gabriel Sherman, the political journalist behind the film’s screenplay, presents Trump and Cohn’s relationship as psychologically basic yet believable. Strong is instinctively intense as an actor, as is well established by his work on TV’s Succession, and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen likes to frame him as if he were a Bond villain slowly emerging from the shadows. He bobs his head when talks, constantly agreeing with his own declarations that, “whatever I do, I do for America”.
Cohn introduces his protege to his three commandments: always be on the attack, deny all, and never, ever, admit defeat. But as the film rolls onward, with stylistic flair, into the Eighties, we’re presented with the inevitable back half of the story. Trump out-monsters his creator, leaving him embittered, betrayed, and dying of the Aids he insists is liver cancer.
Only then does the Trump of today crystallise, as Abbasi’s film becomes a checklist of demagogic traits. He’s depicted as raping his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), as she alleged in her 1990 divorce deposition, which was later recanted by her and denied by Trump. He’s repeatedly asked if he’ll run for office, which he scoffs at in a way that might as well be a knowing wink to camera, and coos over a potential slogan for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, “Let’s make America great again.”
None of it’s as remotely interesting as the scenes shared between Trump and Cohn, and the way the film presents the former as nothing more than the latest, shiniest product shot out the factory line of capitalism and white supremacy. Trump’s attorneys have sent a cease-and-desist letter attempting to block the film’s release. He also, as could have been expected, posted a lengthy rant about it on social media. The Apprentice isn’t particularly worth the fuss. There’s nothing here we aren’t already painfully aware of.
Dir: Ali Abbasi. Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan. 15, 123 mins.
‘The Apprentice’ is in cinemas from 18 October
