Independently financed and threatened with legal action, this villain origin story is a sickening exploration of the former President’s formative years that flat-out refuses to pull punches, writes Yasmin Omar.
There’s a pivotal early scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) where Matthew McConnaughey’s seasoned banker Mark Hanna lays out his exploitative business philosophy to his newest twenty-something broker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) over lunch at an expensive restaurant. The name of the game, as far as Mark’s concerned, is to ‘move the money from your client’s pocket, into your pocket’. Jordan, abstemiously drinking water while his boss necks martinis, challenges this assertion, proposing a more egalitarian model. Mark sighs, noting conspiratorially to the waiter, ‘It’s his first day on Wall Street, give him time.’
The Apprentice – the highly polemical, Seventies- and Eighties-set villain origin story of one Donald J Trump – appears to self-consciously ape Wolf with its similar opening sequence. Sitting, somewhat stiffly, in the exclusive New York club of which he is now the youngest ever member, a teetotal Donald (Sebastian Stan) is beckoned over to the rowdy table of sleazy lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). The powerful men around Roy are his prophets, absorbing his unscrupulous life lessons and guffawing at his dirty jokes as Donald observes, ensorcelled. He is the newest congregant of the church of Roy Cohn...
It’s not controversial to say that the biopic has been in a pretty sorry state in the last few years. Generally speaking, such films largely read as legacy-assuring acts of fan service where any unflattering biographical detail is smoothed away by the massaging hands of the subject’s estate. The Apprentice, by contrast, is so excoriating in its presentation of Trump that it failed to secure major-studio backing, was independently financed, remained without a US distributor for months after its Cannes premiere and was slapped with a cease-and-desist letter from the irate former President. (A Trump spokesperson said the film was ‘malicious defamation’ that belonged ‘in a dumpster fire’.)
For these reasons, it’s bracing to watch The Apprentice. This is an uncompromising movie defiantly working outside the system and answering to no one. There are certainly shocking scenes: Donald on the floor sexually assaulting his wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova), Donald on the operating table having his bald patch stapled together… But The Apprentice’s boldest move is showing how unremarkable a figure Trump really is. Gabriel Sherman’s smartly plotted script portrays him as just another power-hungry, egomaniac rich kid solely motivated by constant acquisition – more properties, more women, more influence, more respect.
The Apprentice (2024)
Ultimately, it’s a film of reversals. The apprentice of the title does not refer to any of the entrepreneurs Trump showed the door during 14 seasons of his so-called NBC show, but to Donald himself. He is the protégé here. (Though, let’s be clear, not a totally guileless naïf, since he’s being sued by the NAACP for creating an apartheid in one of his housing complexes when we meet him.) For the first act of the movie, Donald is not the bombastic, abrasive tyrant he will later become; he’s reserved, deferential, pliant, accepting the spurious teachings that rapid-fire from Roy’s mouth like a discharging machine gun.
Roy is the centripetal force of any room he walks into, trumpeting his successes and boasting about his reputation as ‘Lucifer incarnate’. Donald is Roy’s Pygmalion, the suggestible guy he transforms from a Flushing nepo baby into a Fifth Avenue shark in a $1,100 Brioni suit. Director Ali Abbasi packages these character-building scenes into dynamic montages, which derive a sense of momentum from their many taxicab settings and are overlaid with Roy forcefully monologuing his crooked belief system (‘Always file a lawsuit.’ ‘Liberals are worse than Nazis.’ ‘None of it matters except winning, that’s it.’)
The Apprentice (2024)
During this stretch of The Apprentice, the Cohn role is undoubtedly the showiest and Strong, committed Method actor that he is, pulls it off with aplomb (the performer’s exhaustive research is evident in the way he carries his head exactly as Roy did). The film, like Donald, is initially in thrall to him. Strong exudes the cult-leader charisma required to coax someone into abandoning their – admittedly shaky – values and willingly following you onto the sinking ship of financial crime.
He’s commanding and intimidating, yet always wears his evil lightly, shrugging off his misdeeds with sickly funny wisecracking (it calls to mind Strong’s Succession billionaire beaming after delivering the darkest of dark jokes: ‘Who said I never killed anyone?’). Stan’s task, it must be said, is markedly more challenging. Where to begin playing Donald Trump, one of the most impersonated men on planet Earth? The 34-time felon’s every tic is so recognisable that the actor is on the backfoot before he’s even opened his mouth. Stan admirably avoids slipping into caricature with his accumulative performance.
The Apprentice (2024)
The Apprentice unfolds over roughly two decades, with time-jumps that allow Stan to steadily metastasise into the blustering, self-aggrandising bully we know today (credit must also be due to the hair and make-up team for deepening his perma-tan and flattening his toupee as the years elapse). The Donald Trump of the 1970s, as Stan depicts him, is comparatively passive and introspective, kicked around by developers and hoteliers who’d rather deal with his dad. The actor blankets his speech with a thick Noo Yawk accent, but is otherwise mostly found in quiet, absorbed concentration as he listens to Roy’s speechifying didacticism.
At a certain point, the inevitable reversal comes. Roy has pumped and pumped his mentee with principle-scrambled hot air, swelling his ego to such gigantic proportions that Donald eclipses him, leaving Roy sweatily panting from the exertion, looking small beside the man he once towered over. This is where Donald becomes Trump, and Stan begins seeding in the familiar hand gestures and the eye scrunching and the lip pursuing. Though, thankfully, never to parodic levels.
The Apprentice (2024)
It is always narratively appealing to watch a character become corrupted, which The Apprentice’s screenplay well understands. The film deliberately places Roy and Donald in various comparable scenarios – meetings with the mayor, dinner parties with friends, interviews with the press – at different stages of their contrasting arcs (Roy’s rising and falling on a slumped bell curve, Donald’s shooting up and up and up). Their evolving behaviour is a neat shorthand revealing quite how damaged their respective moral compasses are at any given time.
The writing does have its shortcomings. There are a few too many knowing, elbowing-you-in-the-ribs moments, such as when Donald is introduced to the Reagan campaign slogan he will one day co-opt (‘Make America Great Again’, duh). It’s also guilty of that classic biopic move of having historical figures enter situations as if they’re taking the stand, giving the date and their full names in the most unnatural fashion. However, all in all The Apprentice is a fearless film that shows that the rich stay rich by bending – then outright snapping – the rules at the expense of everyone else. Maybe it’ll shunt some floating voters in Kamala’s direction.
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