The Apprentice (2024) review

Dir. Ali Abbasi

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★½

The Apprentice is a film almost guaranteed to live in obscurity. Conservatives view it as a film tailormade to try and besmirch their seemingly indefatigable messiah, Donald Trump. Liberals are beyond tired of Trump; they see enough of him on the news and in debates to get their fix. For those of us curious enough to check out a biographical drama about the former president, it’s flawed yet well-acted for what it is: a Wall Street-esque tale of the monosyllabic real estate/TV/political tyrant’s rise with the help of his mentor, who created a Frankenstein monster of a narcissist he later couldn’t control.

Writer Gabriel Sherman and director Ali Abbasi — suspiciously not working off of any source material — structure the film in two distinct chapters. The first hour takes place in the 1970s, where an ambitious yet naïve young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) is working under his father, Fred (Martin Donovan). A caustic and manipulative attorney named Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) takes the novice businessman under his wing. Cohn sees something resembling his younger self in the businessman struggling to break free from the control of his father. As a result, Cohn teaches him what suits to wear, how to assert himself, and the three principles that he would later claim as his own in his book The Art of the Deal:

Attack, attack, attack.
Admit nothing, deny everything.
Claim victory, and never admit defeat.

During the second hour of the film, Trump is more recognizable as a mogul who preaches the gospel of greed, blasts unions and social welfare programs, and basks in the beauty of his iconic 42nd Street Trump Tower in a then-undesirable part of New York City. In the middle of all of this, many things happen. He marries a Czechoslovakian socialite named Ivana (Maria Bakalova), struggles to get his younger brother, Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick), sober, messes around with diet pills, is in-and-out of court-rooms trying to get property tax exemption for his many properties, and apathetically watches Cohn weaken and deteriorate.

Across the board, the performances are stellar. Sebastian Stan yet again chameleons himself, this time as a man who might be one of the most difficult figures to play on a serious stage. The cornucopia of parodies and spoofs of Trump have rendered he himself a caricature, and while at times some of Stan’s pronunciations inadvertently recall Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live, he is largely nuanced. Stan particularly nails Trump’s piercing eyes and perpetually pursing mouth movements; even his posture and swagger improves as the film goes on and his legend grows. Jeremy Strong also shines as a take-no-prisoner lawyer and professional fixer, while Maria Bakalova (who should’ve merited an Oscar nomination for her role in Borat 2) refuses to conform to the flyweight, airheaded trophy wife standards her husband has laid out for her.

The title spins Trump’s once-popular reality TV series revolving around him hand-picking someone to promote his properties into a story about the man himself being Cohn’s understudy. By the time the 1980s arrive, Cohn and Trump are in opposite positions. Cohn progressively gets sicker from AIDS while Trump nudges him out of his life, as active in the mythmaking of his self-made legend as he is expanding his national brand. The relationship is akin to Frankenstein, with Cohn creating a monster he comes to realize he can no longer control once the monster makes him beg for favors and later fails to acknowledge his existence.

It’s a strange decision for Sherman and Abbasi to inexplicably shift in time so drastically when much of the first hour of The Apprentice alludes to the slowburn evolution of a man enabled by capitalistic greed. Such a move leads us down the path of sympathy for Cohn, a rat bastard in his own right, whose principles of distorting the truth and committing fraud eventually led to him being disbarred.

Furthermore, much has been made about a handful of scenes in The Apprentice, most of which I suspect few have seen given the film’s dismal box office performance. They are Trump’s raping of Ivana, a scene alleging he’s impotent, and a climactic scene of the former president receiving liposuction to deduce his stomach fat. I found these scenes gratuitous. Beyond being unsubstantiated, they come across as needless shock value for a film revolving around someone whose reckless business practices and amoral nature paint a clear enough picture of the kind of person we’re watching. There’s even a scene where Trump briefly attends to his crying infant son, Don Jr., only for the child’s whereabouts to be unknown for the remainder of the film. Not since Jersey Boys has a subject’s family seen less development despite playing a pivotal role in his story.

Beyond the inexplicable shift in time, the only reason this feeling even manifests is because Sherman and Abbasi don’t seem very aligned in giving the audience something to take away from The Apprentice. This is the problem when a story finds itself based on conjecture rather than source(d) material. It’s almost as if so much time was spent on conjuring up the look of 1970s/1980s New York — beautifully achieved by cinematographer Kasper Tuxen, as the film has the look of a high quality VHS tape with evident film grain and compression suggesting we’re watching archived footage — and having the actors master their respective likenesses that little focus was given to the story being told. It’s hardly shocking that Donald Trump was mentored by a con-man who could pass for Trump himself when in his prime. Moreso shocking is a film with so many strong elements being shaky on its messaging.

Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Charlie Carrick, and Catherine McNally. Directed by: Ali Abbasi.