There’s something easy about a story of seduction by evil. It’s almost always the same: a good person has a flaw that sinister forces use to corrupt them. What’s more challenging is what The Apprentice, director Ali Abbasi’s recounting of the rise of Donald Trump, does: It shows a bad man becoming a monster.
Receiving a coveted secret screening slot at last week’s Fantastic Fest, the movie’s script by Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabriel Sherman is not intended to be revelatory. Instead, much like Sherman’s landmark volume The Loudest Voice in the Room on Fox News supremo Roger Ailes, it’s intended to be informative, to link together the anecdotes and stories that have been drilled into our brains. It’s the polar opposite of Adam McKay’s hectoring approach in Dick Cheney biopic Vice, which often felt less like a film and more like a lecture. Sherman and Abbasi expect us to know the details, and that’s why they can ask us a simple question: Do we really understand them?
At the core of The Apprentice is a relationship that was pivotal to Trump’s rise to power and cultural ubiquity, and how he shifted from regional menace to global malevolence. In 1973, Trump needed a lawyer (not the first or last time) and so he hired Roy Cohn. Not simply a lawyer but a fixer, a powerbroker who gets things done through threats, blackmail, extortion. He was the kind of guy that even his friends would call evil. Somehow, he and Trump managed to bring out the worst in each other, and now we’re living in the wreckage of that relationship that wasn’t just toxic – it was a cultural and geopolitical superfund site.
Succession lead Jeremy Strong has a flair for reviving historical figures, whether it be his twitchy resurrection of Lee Harvey Oswald in Parkland or the surly determination of Jerry Rubin in The Trial of the Chicago 7. As Cohn, he embodies a wiry, Machiavellian malevolence, more measured than Al Pacino’s subtly flamboyant interpretation of the wheeler-dealer for HBO’s adaptation of Angels in America. There’s a danger to him, a predatory charm that attracts Trump, who displays almost naïve shock when he realizes Cohn’s gay.
But even Cohn is caught up in the maelstrom of Trump’s rise which he engineers, and narratively that’s conveyed by an extraordinary performance by Sebastian Stan as he charts the corruption of Trump from standard obnoxious rich guy into the monster we know now. Stan avoids the easily recognizable tics and habits of the modern Trump initially, instead using their development to explore the blackening of an already tarnished soul. But just as the script is informative rather than revelatory, his performance is insightful rather than imitative. Stan grasps that Trump is a product of time and place, a proud New Yorker who goes to the cool bars and parties with Andy Warhol. Through subtle details the film intimates his passage through time (the addition of VHS scan lines in later chapters is a nice touch) and his impact on the city.
The Apprentice undoubtedly humanizes Trump, but not in a way that softens him. If anything, it makes his nightmarish ascent and oafish brutality easier to grasp and even more terrifying. In lesser hands, the opening scenes of Trump going door-to-door to collect rent from his own tenants could induce sympathy, but there’s a bullying edge to Stan’s performance that reminds you he was never a good man. At the same time, Stan captures what the thirtysomething Trump was: awkward, mean, arrogant, but also aspirational, charming, and handsome enough to seduce future wife Ivana Zelníčková, (another spectacular performance by Maria Bakalova).
Most importantly, Sherman and Abbasi deflate the myth that has dominated the last decade, that somehow Trump is some kind of aberration from the historical Republican Party, perverting it to his will. The script shows him as eager inheritor to its established sins, part of a direct line from Nixon to Reagan to him. What he reveals – and what, astoundingly, leaves the monstrous Cohn as somewhat tragic figure here – is that even the GOP was not, quote, braced for his levels of transgression. It’s in this moment that the inspiration for the title is less Trump’s insufferable TV show, and more the Dark Lords of the Sith. At least Cohn, in his twisted, hypocritical, power-hungry fashion, could honestly say he loved America. Even he, The Apprentice states, would be disgusted by what he unleashed.
The Apprentice is slated to open theatrically in Austin on Oct. 11.
The Apprentice
USA, 2024, 120 min.
Secret Screening
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This article appears in September 27 • 2024.
