'The Apprentice' is a riveting if familiar account of Donald Trump's rise to success (2024)

As Dr. Frankenstein once learned, the problem with creating a monster is that eventually, you have to confront the horrors you have wrought.

That's what happened to Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) after mentoring a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), an American parable of greed and betrayal brought to life with a soap-operatic glee in The Apprentice, which is making its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of its pre-election Oct. 11 release date.

The movie has generated plenty of press already, garnering cease-and-desist letters and attempts to block its release from the Trump campaign. But despite that furor, The Apprentice doesn't tell us anything we don't already know (considering the sheer volume of press that Trump has received in the last 10 years).

The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi and written by journalist Gabriel Sherman, chronicles the rise of Donald Trump as a real estate mogul and his descent into greed, egomania, and moral bankruptcy throughout the 1970s and '80s. As a young man desperate to impress his father, Fred (Martin Donovan), Trump finds an unexpected ally in notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, infamous for sending the Rosenbergs to the electric chair at the height of the Red Scare.

Cohn takes Trump under his corrupted wing, teaching him the three rules by which he lives: 1) Attack, attack, attack; 2) Admit nothing, deny everything; and 3) No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat. It's a sickeningly familiar playbook to anyone who's watched the news in the past decade.

As a wheeler and dealer, Cohn covets his power and champions the notion that truth is malleable, embracing his status as an indicted and embattled legal figure. But he also has a secret: He's gay, sleeping with Russell Eldridge (Ben Sullivan) and a host of other men who flit in and out of his circle. But as is so often the case, the student eventually exceeds the master as Trump elevates Cohn's propensity for lies and exploitation of legal gray areas to an art (of the deal).

The film doesn't offer much insight into Trump beyond what's already out there, hitting the bullet points of his withholding father, early forays into real estate, hyperbolic business dealings accompanied by massive debts, and a latent misogyny that eventually extends to even to his wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova). Perhaps that's because there is nothing left to plumb. By this point, Trump and every political pundit with air time has made it abundantly clear who he is and how he got that way. The most disturbing aspect of The Apprentice is how familiar this all is by now and how numb we are to its depravity.

What The Apprentice does have to offer is a masterful slate of performances that far exceed the usual mimicry of many buzzy Hollywood biopics. Stan avoids any of the over-the-top late-night parodies of Donald Trump, instead gradually evolving into the more recognizable bloviating, tanned, grotesque figure. At first, he has the marker of only a few of Trump's tics — the slight pucker of his lips, the halting, hyperbolic repetitive speech patterns.

But as Donny's ego grows, so does his waistline, his bald spot, and his exaggerated way of talking, his lips puckering in direct correlation to his spiraling egomania. Stan shows us that devolution with a careful precision, forgoing imitation for a true embodiment. It's hard to believe that anyone as attractive as Stan could so believably transform into a man so wretched, and yet, he does so with a subtlety that Trump scarcely deserves.

Still, while Stan's transformation is remarkable, the movie's MVP is Strong as Roy Cohn. Strong, who won an Emmy for his portrayal of eldest boy Kendall Roy on Succession, has a gift for humanizing the most corrupt and despicable among us. Without question, Roy Cohn was one of the most repugnant historical figures of the 20th Century, and yet, somehow Strong makes us feel empathy for the man (and really, Mr. Strong, I say this with deep affection: F--- you for that). Strong is able to reach beyond the moral rot and corruption of a person to find whatever fragile piece of a soul his characters may possess.

Strong also delivers a riveting arc, beginning as an overly tanned power player and wasting away into a man felled by his own hubris and the AIDS epidemic. As Trump slowly excises Cohn from his life, you can practically hear Strong mutter, "Et tu, Brute?" as he sizes up the monster he has created.

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Maria Bakalova, Oscar-nominated for her work in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, also delivers top-tier work as Trump's first wife, Ivana. She goes toe-to-toe with her husband, initially winning him over with her model body and her business aspirations (a fact that later turns him against her). Bakalova captures Ivana's conflicted love for Donald and the trappings of his lifestyle while emphasizing that Ivana at least still had some degree of a moral compass. And it's impossible not to relish the strange synchronicity of Bakalova's portrayal of Ivana and the fact that the actress first rose to prominence for her onscreen encounter with former Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Abbasi shoots everything with a tacky, cheap veneer, though it is sometimes difficult to tell if this is intentional or a factor of the independent production's small budget. Regardless, it mostly works. And Martin Dirkov, David Holmes, and Brian Irvine enhance it all with a score that echoes the surging melodies of Succession, a musical motif that now automatically signifies greed and its deleterious consequences.

Near the film's conclusion, Abbasi concocts a cross-cutting sequence that hammers home the thesis of all this camp grotesquerie. As Roy Cohn is laid to rest by a children's choir singing, "My Country Tis of Thee," Donald Trump undergoes liposuction and surgery to remove his bald spot. It distills the cognitive dissonance of Trump and Cohn's success and celebrity, juxtaposing the bloody, ugly, entirely false pursuit of an appealing veneer with the twisted patriotism these two men contend to espouse. Only in America could men like Donald Trump and Roy Cohn exist — their greed, their lust for power, their belief in themselves and their self-importance a product of the myths of independence and self-reliance they were fed since birth. And in that way, The Apprentice encapsulates the American Dream, revealing all the ways in which it can be subverted into a nightmare. Grade: B+