Review: Biopic ‘The Apprentice’ tells Donald Trump's origin story
Ty Burr / The Washington Post
It makes a weird kind of sense that “The Apprentice” is arriving in theaters Friday, a week after “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Both movies are set in New York in the 1970s and/or ’80s. Both are about larger-than-life antiheroes perceived as monsters by many and lionized by others. And both seem perversely designed to disappoint audiences on either side of the aisle.
Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Martin Donovan, Charlie Carrick, Maria Bakalova, Bruce Beaton, Ian D. Clark, Jason Blicker, Mark Rendall.
Rating: R for sexual content, some graphic nudity, language, sexual assault and drug use.
“The Apprentice” isn’t the scorched-earth hit job Trump supporters have feared and others have hoped for. Nor is it the kind of bland Great Man biopic that would sweep its subject’s flaws and crimes under the rug, as in the recent “Reagan.”
It’s something more and less: a well-made and well-acted film that takes the easy way out of having a point of view.
It’s worth mentioning that when the movie played last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, director Ali Abbasi held a post-screening Q&A session in which he stressed that he wanted to make a character study rather than a “political movie.” If that strikes you as disingenuous or naive or both — if the idea of a Donald Trump movie that ISN’T political seems absurd, if even possible — you’re not the only one. (That includes several audience members at the Q&A who expressed surprise that the film wasn’t harder on the 45th president.)
What Abbasi has delivered is hardly without merit. “The Apprentice” is what they call in the superhero business an origin story, the tale of how a raw young real estate brat from Queens became Donald Trump under the tutelage of Satan himself, Roy Cohn. Cohn served as Joe McCarthy’s wingman in the 1950s and by the period of the movie had become the premier legal fixer and dirty trickster for Manhattan’s power elite.
Sebastian Stan (“I, Tonya,” “A Different Man”), a conventionally handsome actor with the knack of shifting shape from film to film, plays Trump. Jeremy Strong, who rose to fame on “Succession” as another hungry, dead-eyed New Yorker in Kendall Roy, plays Cohn. Indeed, Cohn could be Kendall with the remaining flickers of humanity and shame snuffed out.
Strong has the showier performance; his Cohn is reptilian and mesmerizingly assured. He’s the snake in the garden of the Big Apple. Stan, by contrast, does something sneakier, an unnerving combination of technique, impersonation and inhabiting. At the start of “The Apprentice,” Trump is just another outer-borough dreamer. Yes, he’s the son of a wealthy, cutthroat father, real estate developer Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), for whom Donald shakes down rents and redlines Black tenants out of apartments.
Trying desperately to realize his vision of a luxury hotel in the war zone of “Drop Dead”-era Times Square — it ultimately opened in 1980 as the Grand Hyatt — the young Trump schmoozes and bends a knee to anyone he thinks might offer financial backing or an entry to the city’s inner circle where things get done.
At first, he’s simply a curiosity to Cohn, a kid in a bad suit needling him for advice and possibly a sexual conquest. When the latter doesn’t pan out, the older man takes him under his wing as a blank template for the dark arts according to Roy Cohn, rules of the road that in Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay have the blunt force of hindsight.
Rule No. 1: “Attack, attack, attack.” Rule No. 2: “Admit nothing. Deny everything.” Rule No. 3: “No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat.”
Sound familiar?
“The Apprentice” implicitly acknowledges that the young Trump’s vision of New York City rising from the dead was prescient, and it’s also fairly ruthless about his shallowness, callousness and insecurity, especially when it comes to his father. The psych 101 script running beneath the film is that all the bravado and glitz are a facade to get Fred Trump’s attention, a need that can never be fulfilled even as Donald grows in importance and swells in self-importance.
Abbasi offloads our sympathy instead to Fred’s other son, Fred Trump Jr., aka Freddy (Charlie Carrick), a failed airline pilot, full-time alcoholic and this movie’s rather touching Fredo Corleone figure.
Apparently, its Rosebud as well.
A sign of the muffled impact of “The Apprentice” is that the only time its main character shows any sign of vulnerability is when the brother takes his own life in 1981 and Donald, to his horror, erupts in sobs that spew like the backup from a clogged drain. Emotion is the worst sin he can imagine — it’s a weakness, and it gets in the way of the sale. And he’s so ashamed that the outburst occurs in the presence of his wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”), the Czech model he has chased and conquered in the film’s early scenes, that he loses all respect for her.
So, yes, there is the scene of marital rape to which Ivana testified and later recanted. In the film, it’s an ugly argument that becomes something far uglier and more violent, and that Abbasi stages with a detachment not so much reportorial as uninflected. It’s a shocking sequence, yet it leaves barely a ripple.
Why? The Iranian-born director made the striking Swedish drama “Border” (2018) and the brutal “Holy Spider” (2022), about a serial killer in Tehran; both are stories about characters with dark hidden selves. And right there is the problem with “The Apprentice,” and why it doesn’t resonate beyond its frame, let alone its cultural moment.
There may be no hidden self in Donald Trump. What we see is what we get. Because the film’s only storyline is that the man became the monster (or, for some, the messiah) he seemed destined to be. There’s no dramatic tension to push the movie forward. For any sense of tragedy, there would have to be at least a glimmer of self-knowledge. And the film’s Donald Trump — just like, one suspects, the actual man — remains profoundly incurious about himself or anything outside himself.
If tragedy sticks to anyone, it’s Strong’s Cohn, who goes to his grave dying of AIDS, denying he’s gay — already an open secret in 1980s New York’s nightspots and private clubs — and shut out by the protégé who has learned the lessons too well.
“The Apprentice” does right by its recreation of Manhattan during the cocaine years, with cameo appearances by Andy Warhol (Bruce Beaton), Ed Koch (Ian D. Clark), George Steinbrenner (Jason Blicker) and a young Roger Stone (Mark Rendall). It has the era’s soundtrack down, from Studio 54 disco to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider.” But it doesn’t have much of a point.
That doesn’t stop Stan’s Trump from slowly amassing bits of behavior and an arsenal of gestures over the course of “The Apprentice,” until he’s suddenly there in the fullness of his muchness — the reviled, adored, hollow man of our moment. Abbasi brings us up to the edge of Trump’s transformation into a candidate and stops there. Because to go any further would be, I guess, political.
But the actor’s performance may be all the commentary we need in the way Trump subtly metastasizes into something both bigger and more superficial: a man losing himself to self-caricature. A pursed lip, a sidelong glance, a flashed thumbs up and always attention to the mane of hair.
Then, he’s slouching to Washington to be born.