An otherwise rote and unsurprising Frankenstein story about a madman who loses control of the monster he’s created, Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice” does exactly one thing that no other movie ever has before or will again: It makes you feel the smallest possible mote of sympathy for Roy Cohn. That isn’t a compliment, necessarily, but it is some kind of testament to the talent of the actor who plays him (“Succession” breakout Jeremy Strong, no stranger to conveying the tortured humanity of irredeemable characters), and also a very different kind of testament to the unparalleled soullessness of the future world leader who Cohn helped to invent.
When this scuzzy little drama first begins in the late 1970s, it’s Sebastian Stan’s Donald J. Trump — then an insecure Manhattan nepo baby who fumbles around the city in search of his slumlord father’s non-existent affection — whose receding humanity is still visible enough to inspire the same tender pity once evoked by Michael Corleone, or at least his brother Fredo, before he took over the family business. By the time “The Apprentice” reaches the final scene of Gabriel Sherman’s barbed but unilluminating script (which ends with the real estate baron’s first meeting with the ghost writer hired to pen his self-mythologizing 1987 memoir), Cohn has died from AIDS, and Trump has stopped returning his phone calls.
Indeed, this film’s most audacious sequence confirms its “Godfather”-like dimensions with a fittingly vain and sociopathic riff on one of that masterpiece’s signature moments, as Abbasi intercuts Cohn’s funeral with footage of Trump going under the knife for a liposuction. “The Apprentice” doesn’t do anything to suggest that the most notorious prosecutor in American history wasn’t a self-loathing ghoul whose lust to dominate a world that didn’t love him made his country a worse place for everyone who’s had to live in it since, it simply makes the case that the protegee he molded in his own image — only taller, richer, and straighter — was somehow even worse. Cohn may have hated himself, but Trump doesn’t care about anybody.
Sometimes in broad strokes and sometimes with brutal specificity, “The Apprentice” does what it can to dramatize how the student became — and surpassed — his teacher by too perfectly embodying all of his lessons. If those efforts aren’t even close to enough for this movie to shine a meaningful new light on the most overexposed man who’s ever lived (or his mentor), that’s largely because it can’t get around the fact that Trump is too base and pathological to be of much dramatic interest. The guy is a mile wide and an inch deep (at least if you take his ass into account of your measurements), and no amount of “daddy didn’t love me” psychoanalysis is going to fix that.
That “The Apprentice” falls short of its goal is particularly unfortunate because Abbasi seems like such a perfect candidate to helm the first major film about Trump. An Iranian-born provocateur who feels most alive when his work is licking the third rail, Abbasi was only dimly aware of Trump’s existence until the large-adult-son-turned-Lonesome-Rhodes-cosplayer rode down that fucking escalator at the start of his campaign in 2015, and the “Holy Spider” director’s lack of a personal connection to the longtime American celebrity allowed him to approach this story without any trace of the personal vitriol or polemic that anyone raised in the U.S. might have brought to the project.
And it’s true that “The Apprentice” doesn’t feel at all like a Democrat-funded hit piece, but rather a straightforward account of how the worst New Yorker of the 20th century sculpted the worst Floridian of the 21st (and there’s so much competition for both of those titles). Considering what the public knows — and is numb to — about Trump today, even the brutal scene where he rapes Ivana on the floor of their ultra-tacky Manhattan penthouse aligns with our understanding of his character. Abbasi doesn’t linger on it, nor does his film betray the self-impressed sense that it’s shocking us with anything we don’t already know.
The trouble is that Abbasi is still possessed with a morbid curiosity about his subject that most Americans have lost the ability to muster after spending eight years studying a Times Square caricature of a person more closely than any painting in the Louvre. If we can’t be bothered to care about the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president (which hinges upon cover-up payments to a porn star on the eve of a national election!), there’s nothing “The Apprentice” can do to arouse our attention. As a geopolitical calamity, Trump is an interesting figure. As a human being, he’s as boring as it gets.
Be that as it may, Stan makes an impressive attempt at trying to convince us otherwise. That starts by shirking off simple imitation in favor of focusing on the pathos that eventually drove Trump into politics. Stan’s Trump is a far cry from the incredible mimicry of someone like “S.N.L.” star James Austin Johnson (truly the greatest to ever do it). Subtle prosthetics help bridge the ocean-sized gap between Bucky Barnes and the least regal person ever raised in Queens, but Stan’s take on young Trump still looks more like Jimmy Fallon in a fatsuit than he does the real deal.
That’s to the film’s benefit, as it instantly liberates Stan from having to sell us on the look of a singular weirdo, and frees him instead to emphasize Trump’s neediness and impressionability. The way his eyes light up when Cohn first tells him about his “rules of winning,” the way he performs a cheap simulacrum of charisma when he woos his future wife (Maria Bakalova), the way he cruises around pre-Koch New York like the bad guy in a Blaxploitation movie — a vibe enhanced by Kasper Tuxen’s washed out, video-like handheld cinematography, which makes the whole movie look like a gaudy, disco-soundtracked infomercial for the American Dream.
And then of course he flinches at his father’s “tough love,” which he fantasizes about rewarding in kind (Fred Trump is played by Martin Donovan, doing his best with a part too thin to feel like a meaningful counterpoint to Cohn’s influence). “The Apprentice” never tells us anything about Trump that we can’t glean from the “Citizen Kane” poster he tacks to the wall of his bedroom, but that doesn’t stop Stan from searching for hidden crevices of his character’s soul, or at least the dark void where any other character might have had one.
There’s even something vaguely resembling vision about Trump’s zeal for rescuing New York City from its financial woes, or at least his zeal for exploiting them. But the most striking detail of Trump’s gradual transformation from entitled prick to Galactus-sized ego monster is the pride that Stan allows him to take in his tutelage; even as Trump spurns his wayward older brother and turns his back on Cohn at the lowest moment of his life, you sense that he feels whole — not empty — because of how deeply he’s been able to embody his mentor’s principles for success.
Needless to say, Strong’s bat-like take on Roy Cohn is a worthy foil for this movie’s Trump, to the extent that “The Apprentice” may have benefited from centering its focus on the teacher instead. Strong does more with his half-drawn eyelids than most actors could muster with their entire bodies; he packs devilish indifference into lines of dialogue about tax abatements, and hides “Inferno”-like depths of pain behind a face that’s as placid and unmoving as the river Styx itself.
Without putting it into words that would confuse his useful idiot of a new best friend, Cohn molds Trump into the version of himself that life would never allow him to be. Cohn doesn’t want Trump to be his client, he wants Trump to be the reflection he’s always dreamed of seeing when he looks in the mirror. Alas, there’s no cure for any of the viruses that pass through Cohn’s body (Sherman’s script touches upon the AIDS epidemic with a glibness that befits Trump’s own level of concern), and he’s as powerless to stop his surrogate son from turning against him as he is from stopping his lover from dying.
Cohn’s shock at his own betrayal is the most humanizing thing about him — even one of history’s greatest monsters reaches a point where they’re surprised by someone’s abject lack of humanity. And if Trump would do such a thing to his own personal hero, just imagine what he might do to his lackeys. Or to his constituents. Or to his country. Cohn doesn’t live to see it with his own eyes, but we already have. Clipped from the start and increasingly uncertain of its purpose as it fumbles toward the Trump we know, this origin story certainly isn’t as painful to watch as the future that it portends has been to endure, but it’s every bit as banal and unnecessary.
Grade: C
“The Apprentice” premiered in Competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
