We don’t learn much of anything new about Donald Trump in the fictionalized but fact-based biopic “The Apprentice,” because how could we at this point? Trump has been famous for so long and his story has been told so many times that all the stones (including Roger) have been kicked over, time and again.
Still, this is a crackling good period piece chronicling Trump’s rise to power in the 1970s and 1980s under an apprenticeship with the loathsome and notorious Roy Cohn — an unholy alliance with teeth-rattling impact that reverberates to this day.
Director Ali Abbasi (“Border,” “Holy Spider,” the last two episodes of Season One of “The Last of Us”) delivers consistently arresting visuals in teaming with cinematographer Kasper Tuxen to take us back to the New York City of the time — a grimy, financially strapped and crime-riddled metropolis. The screenplay by journalist Gabriel Sherman is built on touchstones in Trump’s career and personal life — albeit with imagined conversations, and a number of scenes that re-create controversial moments in Trump’s life and paint him in a negative light nearly every time.
Most impressive of all are the performances by Sebastian Stan as the raw and ambitious younger Trump, and Jeremy Strong (the “eldest boy” from “Succession”) as the unconscionable Cohn. This is “The Art of the Deal” told as a Frankenstein dark fable.
The Donald Trump we meet at the outset of “The Apprentice” is a handsome, socially awkward hustler with big dreams, cheap suits and little clout. Trump is a middleman who literally collects rent from the downtrodden tenants in “Trump Village,” an apartment complex in Coney Island developed by his cold and cunning father, Fred (a chillingly effective Martin Donovan), who considers Donald to be a lightweight and has raw contempt for Donald’s older brother Freddy (Charlie Carrick), an alcoholic who works as an airline pilot. (Fred Sr. dismissively calls Freddy “a god- – – bus driver with wings.”)
Coming off a kind of “meet brute” with Strong’s Roy Cohn at the members-only Le Club in Manhattan, Donald tells his father that Roy has the connections and the power to help them. An irritated Fred says of Cohn, “He’s a crook, he’s been indicted three times,” to which Donald replies, “He’s never been convicted … The man’s a genius, he ran [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy’s show when he was basically a teenager.”
Trump eagerly plunges into a Faustian agreement with the perma-tanned, sweaty, boorish and terrifying Cohn, who has no qualms about blackmailing opponents with scandalous photographs and illegal secret recordings. Cohn tells Trump that concepts such as truth and morality are “fictions,” and instructs him to follow the Cohn Playbook: Attack, deny everything and admit nothing, always claim victory and never admit defeat. (Sound familiar?) With KC and the Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man” on the soundtrack, we see Trump gaining confidence and making his moves, including a whirlwind romance with the initially resistant and soon charmed Czech model Ivana Zelnickova (Oscar-nominated Maria Bakalova from “Borat,” doing spot-on work.)
Maria Bakalova of “Borat” fame plays Ivana Zelnickova, a model Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) is determined to woo.
Briarcliff Entertainment
With the first-rate production design, costume work and hair/makeup helping to showcase Trump’s rapid and admittedly impressive rise to the real estate big leagues, Stan expertly calibrates his performance to reflect the changes in Trump’s personality and his physique. He becomes bigger, more demonstrative, more verbose, more obstreperous.
It’s remarkable work that never delves into impersonation as we bear witness to Trump morphing into a larger-than-life figure. He works the media, he casually tosses Ivana aside when he’s no longer attracted to her, he rubs his father’s nose in his success — and he becomes less and less dependent on his mentor Roy Cohn, who is embroiled in money problems and is clearly and seriously sick. (To the end, Cohn vehemently denied he had AIDS.) In a grotesque sequence set in Mar-a-Lago, Trump gifts the gravely ill Cohn with cheap and gaudy cufflinks bearing the Trump logo for his birthday, and hosts a ghoulish dinner party. The next morning, we see staffers disinfecting every inch of the dining room.
The performances by Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong are staggeringly good. Stan creates an unvarnished portrait of a man consumed with ambition and winning, no matter the cost, yet there’s a layer of likability packed in. Strong gives a typically all-in performance as Cohn, who truly believes he’s a great American patriot and the ends justify any and all means. When Cohn is broken and lonely and at the end of a destructive, hateful, hypocritical and vicious life and career, we almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
“The Apprentice” is an engrossing origins story of one of the most polarizing, controversial and powerful figures in American history, a man considered by millions to be a superhero and seen by at least an equal number as pure villain.