The first thing you should know is that this biopic is not a hatchet job on the former President. It’s a smart, but not smart-alecky, dramatization of his evolution as an entrepreneur and public figure, under the tutelage of the notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn.
That relationship is at the core of this film, and its impact may be muted somewhat if you’ve seen Matt Tyrnauer’s excellent 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? (still a must-see, it’s streaming on Prime). The compensation is savoring Jeremy Strong’s uncanny performance as Cohn, the man who embodied the word “contradiction.” He was one of a kind, thank goodness, but he blazed a trail that even he couldn’t have predicted for his protégé.
And while Strong has been grabbing most of the attention, let us not fail to praise Sebastian Stan in the movie’s title role. We meet Donald Trump as a young man, working menial jobs collecting rent for his father, a developer. As he awkwardly attempts to break into the big time he meets Cohn, who takes a shine to him and agrees to be his mentor. The young Trump is not what you would call naïve but he is unworldly and has a lot to learn from the older man: business mantras like “never admit defeat” and such.
Stan doesn’t do a standup comedian’s impression of Trump, yet he manages to look and sound amazingly like the man. Writer Gabrial Sherman and director Ali Abbasi give him one great scene after another, and the production designer Aleks Marinkovich and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen do a splendid job of making us believe we are actually in Trump Tower or any of a dozen identifiable locations.
Bulgarian-born Maria Bakalova, who earned an Oscar nomination for her gung-ho contribution to Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, hits all the right notes as Ivana, giving us more empath and understanding than we’ve had thus far.
The Apprentice delivers an entertaining portrait of a three-dimensional human being who so emulates his mentor that he finally acquires all of his most disturbing traits.