The Apprentice ~ Review

In the opening of The Apprentice, a twenty-seven-year-old Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Trump notices Cohn watching him from a private room in an exclusive Manhattan restaurant. Cohn’s sunken eyes look yellow in the red light backlighting his hunched-over figure. This wordless exchange makes Cohn look less like a human being and more like a creature from the underworld, a demon in a suit. It’s a shot that looks like it belongs in The First Omen and not a presidential biopic. Director Ali Abbasi is calling his genre here, this isn’t a biopic, this is a demonic possession story. And like the best demonic possession stories – The Apprentice is a rumination on the nature of evil.

It's 1973 and Donald Trump is frustrated. His father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan) is being investigated by the federal government for discrimination practices against African American tenants. This investigation prevents young Trump from following through on his dreams of making New York City a prime travel destination. Donald intends to do this by buying the dilapidated Commodore Hotel and converting it into a luxury hotel. But Trump is socially awkward, and can’t manage to close the deals he needs, particularly with the investigation into his father’s company heating up. There are other problems in Donald’s life too, his father is emotionally abusive and doesn’t think his youngest son will amount to anything, and his older brother Freddy (Charlie Carrick) is a barely functioning alcoholic. Donald yearns for more, and Roy Cohn – a Machiavellian scheming fixer, who seemingly knows everybody in New York who has any form of social standing whatsoever, is the key to getting Donald what he wants.

Cohn mentors the naive Donald and teaches him his three rules of life; 1. Always attack, 2. Never admit wrongdoing, and 3. Always claim victory, even if defeated. Much to the young Trump’s surprise these tactics – along with blackmail obtained by Cohn allow Trump to buy the Commodore Hotel, leading to his rise to fame and power. Along the way, Donald begins courting and marries Czech model Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova). 

The Apprentice is a film that really shouldn’t work. For one thing, a Trump biopic in the year of our lord 2024 screams as an opportunistic scheme—a way to ring profits out of controversy. However, the script by journalist Gabriel Sherman paints its characters in shades of grey. Donald Trump and Roy Cohn are human beings, not straight-up monsters. One of the canniest things about the film is how it plays with audiences’ allegiances. For the first two acts, you’re on Donald Trump’s side, hoping he gets his dream of making his luxury hotel and reconfiguring the Manhattan skyline in his image. And you understand how seductive the bacchanalian world of Roy Cohn would be. But then, as the movie shifts into its third act, the greed and lust for power go right to Trump’s head. You see Donald Trump’s soul rot from inside his body. As Roy Cohn begins dying of AIDS…the film’s sympathies shift and you start feeling sorry for him. 

Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong deliver fantastic performances. Stan has probably the toughest job of all because over the past four decades, we have seen so many Donald Trump impressions, even before he made the jump to politics. For a man who can easily be portrayed as cartoonish, Stan’s work here is surprisingly subtle, grounded, and shockingly heartfelt. He doesn’t simply do an over-the-top voice impersonation and call it a day. However, he does imitate Trump’s mannerisms and gesticulations in more subtle ways which convey character and don’t feel like a parody.

Jeremy Strong is fantastic as Roy Cohn. Strong gives this monstrous character surprising depths of humanity, which is impressive given all the horrendous things Cohn did. Maria Bakalava is good as Ivanna Trump, but she’s not given a whole lot to do. The always-reliable Martin Donovan plays the overbearing Fred Trump with gruffness, but I wish the script had explored Trump’s relationship with his father more. Since surrogate fathers are a major theme here, it would have been nice to see more of Fred Trump.

The film isn’t perfect, some of the real-life political figures who come in and out of the story feel like caricatures rather than real people, and there are some annoyingly heavy-handed references to Trump’s future political career. But Stan and Strong give such incredibly nuanced performances, that it all works in the end.

That word, nuance, keeps rolling around in my mind regarding The Apprentice. Donald Trump and Roy Cohn are real people. And I think it’s important that in order to combat the horrible things Trump is doing, to view him as a real person. And ultimately The Apprentice is about how a monster is created from a real human being.

Three stars out of Four