Though releasing a dramatic film about Donald Trump in October of an election year could be construed as opportunistic timing, according to director Ali Abbasi his new project The Apprentice has been in the works since 2019. Among other good-natured justifications, Abbasi, an Iranian living in Denmark, explained at the film’s West Coast premiere, hosted by Beyond Fest and the American Cinematheque, that The Apprentice’s writer and producers had sought him out because they were in search of an outsider’s perspective. Donald Trump is a uniquely divisive figure, and for the task of portraying his origins they wanted someone capable of the objectivity that distance can bring.

Their tactic, by that measure, has succeeded. The Apprentice is not a hit piece, nor is it so-called liberal propaganda. It is instead a fun and funny, occasionally grim look at the rise of one of modern history’s great provocateurs. While it doesn’t succeed on every level, what could have been a maudlin diatribe is instead a remarkably even-handed portrait of a ridiculous, ridiculously terrible man.

The Apprentice chooses as its entry point the relationship between Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) and his mentor, conservative lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). For those unfamiliar, Cohn was a staunch Reaganite who, among many dubious achievements, served as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during his anti-Communist hearings; was responsible for the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, imputed Soviet spies, after holding illegal ex parte communications with the judge during which he argued for their death; and successfully advocated for Eisenhower’s banning of homosexuals from federal employment during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. Cohn himself was a closeted homosexual, and died of AIDS-related complications in 1986 shortly after being disbarred by the New York State Supreme Court for defrauding his own clients.

The film, like many think pieces before it, attempts to draw a through line between Trump’s phraseology, his “winner” mentality as we know it today, and the lessons Cohn impressed upon him as a young real estate heir in New York. Cohn was, in many ways, as colorful a character as Trump himself, and the relationship between the two is rich for mining.

In the early 1970s Trump cajoled Cohn into representing his father, Fred Trump, after the latter was credibly accused by the Justice Department of excluding African American renters from his New York apartments. Using this as its inciting incident, The Apprentice charts Trump’s growth from slumlord to real estate mogul until the time of Cohn’s death.

The Apprentice was always going to live and die by its casting, and the unusual choice of Sebastian Stan in its lead role is the film’s greatest boon. With uncanny grace, Stan deftly makes a convincing character of what could so easily have become parody. He has mastered the Trump mannerisms such that they never read as superficial, and has enough restraint in his delivery to avoid the pitfalls of caricature. The result is a performance both irreverent and totally believable.

Stan is aided by subtle prosthetics that add heft to his neck and jowls, but the makeup team has forgone the distractions of a fake nose or chin. Stan, despite looking nothing like his subject, instantly sells the illusion. More than that, he effectively grows into the character, allowing his affectations to become more pronounced as time progresses. The rendition should quickly dispel any doubts as to whether Stan is capable of more than franchise fare.

Jeremy Strong, fresh off his run on HBO’s Succession, has in some ways an equally difficult task in taking on Roy Cohn. While Cohn is not as instantly recognizable a figure as Trump, he has already been portrayed on two prior occasions, the first by James Woods in 1992’s Citizen Cohn. The larger hurdle for audiences may be HBO’s 2003 Angels in America miniseries. Anyone who has seen the Mike Nichols adaptation of Tony Kushner’s 1991 Pulitzer-winning stage play likely has Al Pacino’s singsong rendition of Cohn indelibly stamped on their subconscious. Strong, it could be argued, plays it closer to the truth, but there is an ecstatic truth to Pacino’s performance which is difficult to overcome.

Strong is nevertheless effective, eliciting a number of The Apprentice’s bigger laughs, and selling the odd tragedy of both Cohn’s illness and Trump’s ultimate ingratitude towards him. Still, he lacks the naturalness of Stan’s transformation. 

By the same token, The Apprentice retreads out of necessity some of the ground already covered by Angels in America, e.g., Cohn’s retelling of the Rosenberg trial, or his understanding of homosexuality as a distinction of class. Even if The Apprentice were hampered only by its brevity, and not its lack of Kushner and Pacino, it would be unfair but unavoidable to compare the two.

Comparisons aside, the film’s only major failing is its characterization of a younger Trump. The opening segments saddle Stan with a downtrodden naïveté, a “Golly, Mr. Cohn, isn’t this illegal?” attitude which does not feel credible given the heights of inhumanity he later comes to reach. It’s an understandable effort to humanize Trump, but without some hinge point to justify his transformation, the arc as a whole is not entirely satisfying. Still, Stan’s performance does wonders to paste over whatever minor inconsistencies are apparent in Gabriel Sherman’s script. Maria Bakalova (previously seen, in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, suffering a hotel incident in which Trump’s right-hand man Rudy Giuliani became a wrong-hand man) as Ivana Trump is also convincing, yet her character suffers from similar issues.

Another minor quibble: given that we know where all this leads, certain small moments (like Cohn admonishing Trump to never admit defeat) almost read as the wink-nudge prequel-isms that so riddle today’s mainstream behemoths. In a film otherwise so intelligent, these feel out of place.

Yet Abbasi has managed to craft something that is, above all, fun. The shift from 1970s film grain to subtle ‘80s video distortion sells the momentum of history; the engaging soundtrack keeps pace. The Apprentice feels brisk at 2 hours, and avoids the arduous pitfalls of any biopic, because it’s not. It’s a memoir. What could easily have been a mawkish snapshot of our own time, is instead an earnest portrayal of a historical figure which should stand the test.