The Appren­tice review – Demands sym­pa­thy for the devil

When Don­ald Trump was elect­ed Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States in 2016, so much of Amer­i­can cul­ture became ret­ro­spec­tive­ly seed­ed with East­er eggs fore­shad­ow­ing his even­tu­al ascent. Future gen­er­a­tions, unlike mine, will have no trou­ble imag­in­ing how this could pos­si­bly have hap­pened. For so long Trump was present with­in dis­course on busi­ness, crime, race, and pol­i­tics; he was in Home Alone 2 and had a show on NBC; he was a late-night talk-show punch­line and appeared at Wrestle­Ma­nia. He was so ubiq­ui­tous, for so long, how could he not have become President?

It is, then, very dif­fi­cult to make a movie that has some­thing new to say about Don­ald Trump, that tells a new sto­ry or shows a new side of the most famous per­son – prob­a­bly – you’re not sup­posed to say this – but they’re say­ing – many peo­ple are say­ing – he’s the most famous per­son, frankly, that we’ve ever seen, and we’re see­ing him more and more. The task before The Appren­tice – a biopic telling the sto­ry of Trump’s rise in the New York real estate world in the ​’70s and ​’80s, abet­ted by the noto­ri­ous fix­er Roy Cohn – is there­fore a for­mi­da­ble one, and it’s not a task to which direc­tor Ali Abbasi and screen­writer Gabriel Sher­man prove remote­ly equal.

The film begins in New York City, in the ​’70s, at an exclu­sive mem­bers’ club where Trump (Sebas­t­ian Stan), the twen­tysome­thing son of out­er­boro slum­lord Fred (an unrecog­nis­able Mar­tin Dono­van), nar­rates the pow­er play­ers in the room to his bored date. Trump is an out­sider, a striv­er,
pal­pa­bly uncom­fort­able – but there, through a door­way, is Roy Cohn, for­mer Joe McCarthy aide dur­ing the the Red Scare of the 1950s and infa­mous lawyer for mob­sters and oth­er pow­er play­ers, pub­licly revealed after his death from AIDS to be a clos­et­ed gay man. Cohn takes an inter­est in Trump, and smooths the wheels for his first big deal, the over­haul of the old Com­modore on Manhattan’s then-decrepit 42^nd Street.

For the first hour of the film, Stan’s Trump is, delib­er­ate­ly, not the man we know today: his voice has a slight Queens bray, but he avoids all the caricaturist’s tics, mur­murs soft­ly and almost ten­der­ly at times, even when describ­ing his ambi­tions. Stan plays him as he’s writ­ten, ner­vous and unformed and frankly sym­pa­thet­ic, gen­uine­ly drawn to Ivana (Maria Bakalo­va) for her ambi­tions, a finicky and unschooled naïf wan­der­ing around Cohn’s deca­dent par­ties avoid­ing the drugs and gay sex.

The sound­track aspires to an incon­gru­ous­ly feel-good loose­ness that the film doesn’t back up. I’ve nev­er been unhap­pi­er to hear Sui­cide, Pet Shop Boys or New Order, and the smash cut and nee­dle drop that takes us out of Trump’s rape of Ivana (a scene from her divorce depo­si­tion, staged as lurid­ly as you’d expect from the direc­tor of Holy Spi­der) is espe­cial­ly egre­gious. By halfway, Trump gets more fla­grant­ly cru­el, delu­sion­al, thin- skinned and aggres­sive. It’s the kind of charis­mat­ic antihero’s jour­ney that might fly in a Scors­ese film – arguably the ulti­mate Trump film is The Wolf of Wall Street – but Abassi and Sherman’s take on the mate­r­i­al is large­ly dutiful.