Before he was a real-estate and casino mogul, Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) was knocking on doors at Trump Village collecting rent for his father, Fred (Martin Donovan).  When the State of New York moves a case against the Trumps for discrimination regarding their leasing practices, Donald convinces Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) to represent the family in court.  It will be the first of many victories for the pair who will take New York City and turn it into their own personal playground, but Donald has his sights set on expanding his empire even if it means leaving Roy behind. 

Ali Abbasi’s hotly contested biopic of the origin story of the most embattled US president in the country’s history and the wickedly powerful lawyer that set him on his path to the White House, The Apprentice debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and went without distribution until Briarcliff Entertainment took a chance on the divisive title releasing it theatrically mere weeks ahead of the 2024 general election.  While Right Wing Media has been putting out a lot of Trump-centric media, The Apprentice is an unflattering look at the man with Gabriel Sherman penning the script based on court testimony and other public record.  Running an even 120 minutes, the film expertly walks the tightrope of humanizing these characters enough that we care about them, knowing what they will become, but treating them with such righteous contempt that we never make the mistake of seeing them as antiheroes.  A note for clarity, the characters in the film will be referred to by their first names while last names will be used to refer to them as the people in real life. 

The film features Stan in almost every scene, but it is a balancing act as the narrative – especially the front half – is much more interested in Roy.  Strong is a menacing force in the film, always in the background of the scene or coming in from out of frame.  It is a showy performance full of little ticks as he bobs his head, speaks with an affectation, and physically holds his body, specifically when we see the actor in profile as it is almost like his head is precariously balanced on his neck.  Abbasi, Sherman, and Strong make no mistake in portraying Roy as a predator; a barracuda, ferocious, strong, and always on the hunt.  This metaphor works a couple of different ways as the film posits that Roy was initially drawn to Donald for his looks, welcoming him into the inner circle to the jealous ire of Russell Eldrige (Ben Sullivan), a young and very, shall we say, personal assistant, to similarly avoid naming this relationship as Sherman avoids it, to the layer who does not take kindly to the introduction of this new blonde-haired fascination of Roy’s. 

Roy disappears from the narrative for much of the middle act, but his influence is always felt as we watch Donald put his teachings into practice.  Like Strong, Stan has a nuanced and physical performance that carefully toes the line so as not to fall into parody.  Stan is at his best in longer scenes where he can paint a fuller picture using all of these ticks and flourishes as the shorter scenes do seem a little more forced and mimicking.  Stan and Abbasi are working completely in tandem and the actor is not afraid to be humbled in front of Kasper Tuxen’s lens.  The film works like a backhanded compliment to the Trump name, and it works because Stan fully embraces being the punchline to a very deadpan joke.  In this way, the performance is akin to Stephen Root’s turn as Milton if Office Space (1999) was deadly serious instead of a sendup of corporate culture as Donald is almost bumbling, especially in the early throws of the film.  Abbasi and Sherman are not coming to this project with a sense of valorizing adoration, but a morbid fascination with the soulless ruthlessness of the rich and powerful and just how – again, in a darker sense – silly the little power games are that they play with each other; it is just unfortunate that for us, the masses, we are the pawns. 

There is a third player in this slightly Shakespearean tragedy: Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova).  She enters the scene and adds a splash of color to the rather beige, brown, and grey color palate with her bright red cocktail dress and platinum blonde hair.  She presents as a challenger to Roy for Donald’s attention, and while coming in at the halfway mark of the film and receiving the smallest slice of the pie regarding screentime, Bakalova never allows the outsized personalities around here to dampen her presence.  She brings a new energy to the narrative, and she is wisely not used as our conduit into this world of the shady elite, but rather she is used to help change the tone of the film from something almost like a meet-cute romantic comedy to an outright psychological horror.   

Among many of the complaints levied against the film by Republicans close to Trump is that the script was based on court reporting from Trump’s divorce hearing in which Zelníčková testified that she was raped by him.  The film shows this in not-too-graphic detail, but there is no questioning what we are seeing and the imagery is quite upsetting.  It is a brief yet haunting scene that the film had silently and slowly been building toward, but it does not sensationalize the act or sexualize it to lessen the feeling that this attack is exactly that: an attack.  Instead, Bakalova must internalize it all, and the following scene as she composes herself in the back seat of a limo ahead of the unveiling of her husband’s latest hotel is a starkly different version of this woman than we saw as she was imagining the hollowed out concrete skeleton of a building which she would transform into a glorious atrium with imported marble and a stories-tall waterfall installation piece.  It is a silent scene, it is only a few seconds long, but in that time she covers the audience with the weight of grief and loss that will go on to inform and influence the third act of the film. 

For Donald, at arguably the height of his unanimous power, the rest of The Apprentice plays out like the heavy ringing of funeral bells.  For Roy, it is a funeral after a humiliating birthday celebration that is the one moment in this otherwise vicious film where we are actually meant to feel sorry for these terrible men.  Sneaking a peak at our crystal ball, it is just the first of many examples of Trump shafting those who he once held close so we should not be surprised, but Strong really sells the pain and the humiliation of being betrayed and swindled.  Donald gets off a little better as he dictates to Tony Schwartz (Eoin Duffy), the ghostwriter of his 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal, but even from this perch high above the city while he proselytizes on the rules which Roy taught him, Stan lets a bit of fear creep into the performance. The victory here is that Icarus did reach the sun, but he refuses to acknowledge his charred wings.  A slightly more apt, but less visual metaphor would simply be that the emperor has no clothes.   

For years, the Trump Brand was a symbol of success, a capitalist marvel, but The Apprentice paints his growth as a cancer, a leach, and he will keep growing and climbing, cutting off anything he views as dead weight and using their corpse as a stepstool.  Sherman’s script does not spell this out explicitly, but Abbasi’s direction teases this out with surgical precision so that it is unmissable.  This is not a success story, but perhaps more of a cautionary tale.  Sometimes the allusions get a little heavy-handed, but the film wisely avoids any direct commentary on Trump’s current political standing, yet the specter of his presidency unavoidably looms heavy over the narrative.  Sherman and Abbasi are not levying blame on their audience, nor are they letting this film act as a get-out-of-jail-free card for their subject, but rather they are using their film as a way to reconcile what was, in 2016, an inconceivable scenario and is now our unfortunate truth.