At this point, we’ve all had some sort of experience with Donald Trump. Since the mid 2000s, the real estate titan turned reality TV star turned President turned Insurrectionist has dominated public and political life in the United States, for better or worse. But no persona just comes fully formed like The Donald. Ali Abbasi takes us back to the late 1970s/early 1980s to show us how the Trump we know today was forged in the tumult of a chaotic New York City, for better, and, more likely, for worse.
During those early years Donald (Sebastian Stan) was doing his nepo baby thing: working for his dad Fred’s (Martin Donovan) real estate empire hustling down checks from poor tenants in one of their Trump Village buildings. At an exclusive club for the rich and powerful, Donald gets targeted by Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), maybe the US’s most cutthroat attorney. Donald becomes enamored with Cohn and his success, and begs him to teach Donald Roy’s art of the deal, er, winning strategies, so Trump can grow into the real estate high society mogul he wants to be so badly.
The Apprentice walks a tried and true formula: the super”hero” origin story. Ali Abbasi uses the bullet points of DJT’s rise to power to concoct Revenge of the Sith for the former President. Roy Cohn is your gay, tanned dark Obi Wan Kenobi, slowly transforming his padawan into a Sith Lord. Ivana (Maria Bakalova) shows up, and for a brief moment (a few years) maybe seems like Trump’s Padme, who can actually connect with this antisocial soulless corporatist. And Trump’s “Empire” takes advantage of New York’s vulnerable Republic, using every scheme in the book to get the power he needs to make himself like himself, if only briefly. Some of this review are my own feelings towards Donald, but they’re apparently Ali Abbasi’s as well, bluntly tying Trump’s current lifestyle with his past one to make it clear just how insufferable, cruel, and just plain evil the sad, impressionable 1980’s Donald was going to become, and how all of the ways he lives today were built 40 years ago during this moldable time in his life. I’m even more sure most of The Apprentice is true…because Donald Trump threatened to sue everyone involved in this film, as Roy Cohn would have hoped his Anakin Skywalker would have handled the situation.
But as movie, I’ll remember The Apprentice more as a well acted character piece. Sebastian Stan walks into a world of a zillion Trump impressions and finds a way to craft a movie character out of the guy. Over the arc of the film, Stan takes Donald from a blank slate, kinda scared boy into the Art of the Deal near caricature most people probably expected Stan to do. For playing a man without much nuance, the portrayal is pretty complex, an impressive feat. But the big winner here is Jeremy Strong. His Roy Cohn is pure icky brilliance, a man equally amoral and impressive, bound by NOTHING. The Apprentice doesn’t work if Strong doesn’t make you believe a young Trump would have followed this weirdo Republican genius to the ends of the Earth, but thankfully Strong is electric and dirty to perfection, a firework that transfers its USA colored explosions to Trump as the film goes on.
So if you didn’t know, now you know. Despite Donald Trump’s Roy Cohn taught best efforts, The Apprentice is out there for everyone to see. And when you see Trump denying everything in this movie as false/lies, you could choose to believe him…or you could hopefully see with new eyes that this is one of his stolen tactics in order to make people believe he’s much stronger/more powerful than he actually is.