The singular piece of publicity most helpful to The Apprentice, a film about Donald Trump that opened in the US last week and opens in the UK this Friday, is the fact its subject tried to block the movie’s release. The title refers to Trump’s adventures as a young man under the informal mentorship of the notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn – former chief counsel for Joseph McCarthy, among other things – and from whom, the movie suggests, Trump picked up much of his conniving and ruthlessness. Trump is so lurid in life that he may be impossible to fictionalise, but the movie has a good crack. That it fails leaves one feeling vaguely cheated of an opportunity to deepen one’s loathing for Trump with a little more background and insight.
With the US election two and half weeks away, any representation of Trump, if it’s not up to scratch, risks looking like either an act of hubris or total obliviousness. The Apprentice, which languished in development for years before getting a boost when the actor Jeremy Strong agreed to play Cohn, is at best a tabloid romp in which Trump-as-playboy is compellingly rendered and at worst a piece of counterintuitivism so obvious it’s more predictable than a straightforward hatchet job. Sebastian Stan, as the young Trump, injects just the right level of nascent tics into his performance – the pursed lips, the flapping hands, the constant faffing with the hair – so that he appears physically very convincing. At the front end of the movie, the film-makers also make Trump appear gauchely, winningly, absurdly sympathetic.
