‘The Apprentice’: The Donald Trump Movie That Trump, and All Of Us, Deserve

With a coming second Trump Administration more than an outside possibility, it’s actually quite a gift that movie lovers can see ‘The Apprentice,’ a movie about young Donald Trump, in theaters right now. It’s even more of a gift that this movie is excellent, anchored by two award-worthy performances, lightly satiric but also deeply tragic, and nearly devoid of hyperbole, a real accomplishment given its outrageous subject matter.

THE APPRENTICE ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Ali Abassi
Written by: Gabriel Sherman
Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan
Running time: 120 mins

The Apprentice is a film about Trump’s relationship with Roy Cohn, the amoral lawyer who did America a service by sending the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, a disservice by backing up Senator Joe McCarthy, and a your-miles-may-vary service by teaching Donald Trump to “attack attack attack” and never admit defeat. When we first meet young Donald, he’s collecting rent in crummy apartment buildings for his slumlord father. He has a full head of hair and a flat stomach full of formless ambition.

Trump meets Cohn at a social club for rich guys. Cohn, who was somehow closeted and yet openly, hedonistically gay in the 1970s, takes Trump under his wing, not as some sort of chicken, but as an inheritor to the ruthless power throne. And then he manages to weasel the Trump family out of a housing-discrimination lawsuit, setting the precedent for decades of outrageous and probably illegal real-estate behavior.

Sebastian Stan, the Winter Soldier himself, delivers a flawlessly immersive Trump. He’s thoroughly believable as a callow youth, and when Trump transforms into the grotesque 1980s mogul that Spy Magazine called a “short-fingered vulgarian”, Stan manages to keep him human, not some Darrell Hammond-style SNL caricature. With his performance in The Apprentice and a very different performance in this year’s A Different Man, we now have to characterize Stan as an actual actor.

But The Apprentice really belongs to Jeremy Strong as Cohn, a familiar figure to those who study American history but not, unlike Trump, the first thing that crosses the transom of every feed in the morning. In the movie’s first half, Strong plays Cohn as brash, ruthless, and evil, a man who will do whatever it takes to hold on to power for himself and his clients. But in the second half, as the “gay cancer” consumes New York City’s gay community, he is weak, diminished, and sad, clearly reckoning with his fate and the demons he unleashed on the world. Strong, the most method actor currently working, takes one of the great monsters of the world and humanizes him deeply.

Ali Abassi directs ‘The Apprentice’ without a lot of trickery. He tells this story straight, with almost a reverence for the melodramatic up-and-down fortunes of New York in the 1970s and 1980s. He recognizes Cohn, and Ed Koch, and even, to some extent, Trump as historical characters. The Apprentice, like the New York Times used to be, is a kind of paper of record. Gabriel Sherman’s script eschews cliché, choosing to humanize Trump and Cohn’s relationship, and even Trump’s relationship with his troubled, alcoholic older brother. Only occasionally, like when Young Roger Stone sells Trump on the “Make America Great Again” slogan, does the script refer to the current political situation. But it’s also not a script that lionizes Trump. He is greedy and cruel, essentially rapes his wife Ivana (an excellent Maria Bakalova), and gets liposuction and hair plugs while Cohn is dying of AIDS.

Every President gets the movie they deserve. The cinema has certainly worked over Richard Nixon and lauded Abraham Lincoln. ‘The Apprentice’ is either better than what Trump deserves or exactly what he deserves. This isn’t some sort of satirical, overblown agitprop from the likes of Oliver Stone or Adam McKay, who brought us the George W. Bush Administration. If anything, it’s closest in tone to ‘Southside With You,’ a sweet hagiography about the courtship of Barack and Michelle Obama. This movie is different in tone, but not really in style. You couldn’t ask for two different Presidential origin stories, which is the entire point. ‘The Apprentice’ sets the historical record straight and is also damn entertaining, and you can’t want much else from a movie.