Love him, hate him, call him the best thing to ever happen to politics or regard him as the devil himself, everyone has an opinion on Donald Trump.
With the former president going for a second White House bid, The Apprentice is a timely examination of the system, and more specifically, the man, who put him in the limelight.
The Apprentice focuses on a young Donald Trump crossing paths with renowned political fixer Roy Cohn, a man known to get Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan out of a jam.
At the outset of the film, Trump is trying to break out of his father’s shadow and wants to stand on his own two feet when his paths cross with Cohn.
Cohn takes Trump under his wing and teaches him everything he needs to know in a bid to win; lie, double down on it, and never admit defeat.
Sebastian Stan stars as the future American president, and while he doesn’t bother too much trying to mimic Trump’s voice with 100% accuracy he does a fantastic job at playing the Trump mannerisms.
The hand gestures, the weird pout Trump is known for doing and the motormouth run-on sentences are all present and accounted for and at a certain point it feels like you’re watching a behind-the-scenes documentary about Trump as opposed to a drama about him.
It is spooky how much Stan vanishes into the role; in recent years Stan has gathered an impressive CV such as playing rock star Tommy Lee in the mini series Pam + Tommy, a sleazy tech bro in Dumb Money and more recently, handed himself over to a kooky auteur director in A Different Man.
All four performances point to Stan working very hard to break out of the Marvel bubble and it is refreshing to see a star like him use his clout to get these projects off the ground.
Dublin man Brendan Gleeson played Trump in the forgettable mini-series The Comey Rule in 2020 and while Gleeson looked exactly like Trump he didn’t have the mannerisms down.
Stan succeeds where Gleeson failed by nailing the essence of Trump and it would not be surprising if the film got awards season attention.
The other half of the coin is Succession star Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn.
Strong became a global star thanks to his exploits as Kendall Roy on the hit HBO show and it is always a treat to see Strong totally melt into a character.
Strong was the only actor to come away from The Trial Of The Chicago 7 with any sense of dignity with his performance as Jerry Rubin one of the only highlights of that miserable Sorkin slog.
It is amusing to see him go from playing a 60s hippie to the powerbroker who made the American conservative revolution happen, sandwiched between his role as a spoilt rich boy on Successino.
Roy Cohn has been depicted in media before, with Al Pacino notably winning every award going for his portrayal in the Mike Nichols’ 2003 mini-series Angels In America, but Strong plays Cohn with a pang of sadness that seems almost impossible.
Strong does something extraordinary – he grounds Roy Cohn with a sense of strange empathy and sadness.
The film is incredibly unsubtle in how Cohn is portrayed; it is made very clear that Cohn is a corrosive influence and he is taking Trump along for a ride.
The film begins during the Watergate era and goes up until the late 1980s when the Trump brand becomes a global one, and Cohn’s fall coinciding with Trump’s rise is portrayed in depth.
Cohn is a crucial figure in the story of Donald Trump’s rise to the top and he is a man with enough baggage to fill an airport.
Cohn is unapologetic in his right-wing views, viewing America as his “number one client” as a lawyer and looking to uphold conservative American values at all costs.
Cohn sees a protege in Trump and the film is very explicit in the implication that Cohn moulded Trump in his own image.
Over the course of two hours you fully see Trump go from an eager up-and-comer into someone who has basically become his older mentor, with Cohn himself remarking he has lost his last trace of decency along the way.
The film has taken on a life of its own since its Stateside release, with none other than Trump himself weighing in on the film being an inaccurate portrayal of him.
While it is doubtful that the man himself has seen the film, it is not surprising that Trump regards the film as a hit piece against him; the film spells it out that Trump started his path to glory as someone with some ideals and empathy only to have them totally eroded by Cohn’s influence.
Furthermore, the film states that Trump allowed his alcoholic brother Fred to die because he cast his family aside in his rise to the top and attempted to force his elderly father into signing an important legal document that he doesn’t fully understand.
Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi and American journalist Gabriel Sherman have a tight rope to walk in attempting to portray Trump; the audience is watching the film with the full knowledge that one day the central character will become the most powerful person in the world.
The film loses marks for doing the cutesy historical biopic trick one too many times.
Think about how many historical films you’ve seen over the years where a character makes a reference to something a character does something later in life; think the line about John F Kennedy towards the end of Oppenheimer or the absolute worst scenes in music biopics where someone says a famous lyric in conversation and a character says that should be the name of a song.
The Apprentice falls into the obvious trap of characters asking Donald Trump if he wants to run for elected office someday or having him address his son as Donald Junior just so audiences get the idea of who he’s talking about.
With that said, being subtle may not have been the route to go when you are dealing with Donald Trump, a man who puts the b in subtle, but when the rest of the film is a studied psychodrama about two men these Hollywood moments threaten to pull you right out of it.
Abbasi and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen settle for an interesting visual style; the film is presented in a mix of scuzzy VHS quality and film stock.
The closest comparison is the work carried out by Danny Boyle and his cinematographer Alwin Küchler in their 2015 collaboration Steve Jobs where the cinematography changes in accordance with the progression of time in the film.
Some scenes are shot in the grainy and crackly VHS format which lends the film a more cinéma vérité style which allows us to feel like we are seeing old home movies of Trump’s greatest hits and then some scenes are shot in the typical Hollywood digital style to mke it look like a typical film.
On a big screen it takes a bit of time for your eyes to adjust to the style, and Abbasi insists on using a pseudo-handheld shooting style and jumpy editing techniques to give the film a sense of gritty reality and tone.
The Apprentice knows it doesn’t have a typical film subject at the centre of the film and it figures it might as well go for an unconventional directorial technique.
Abbasi’s previous film, the Cannes-winning Holy Spider, was also quite punk and DIY in it’s directing style and it is always refreshing to see a director with a new directorial style make waves in the Hollywood system.
Of course, this film isn’t a typical Hollywood film, in no small part because the film has Irish funding involved.
It has been widely reported that the film had trouble securing financing from major studios and is a classic European film where the financing was cobbled together from various small production companies.
Dublin production company Tailored Films are among the credited companies who made the film happen and it takes a brave studio to release a film this politically charged and unapologetic in the middle of a heated election season.
People expecting a typical Trump film might be disappointed, but The Apprentice wisely realises that a typical Trump rags to riches biopic wouldn’t be interesting.
By zooming in on a specific part of Trump’s life, most notably the exact heartbeat before he became a household name, the film is able to fully explore the system that allowed him to flourish.
The film is worth seeking out regardless if you know every facet and turn of the Trump story, want to know about him when he was still a New York property man or simply want to explore how Nixon’s conservative revolution in 1968 is largely responsible for the world we live in today.
The film is just as rewarding as a character study or for American political geeks who have worn out their West Wing boxset and want something fresh before the big showdown on November 5.