The MAGA faithful and liberal audiences will probably boycott it for entirely different reasons but this tale of the rise of Donald Trump and the fall of his mentor Roy Cohn is a riveting story of power, corruption and lies
Their eyes lock for the first time across a gloomy, luxuriantly carpeted New York club in 1973. The older man is Roy Cohn, the McCarthyite lawyer who helped try and then fry the Rosenbergs twenty years previously and went on to master of the dark arts in the election of Nixon and Reagan; the younger man is Donald Trump, a 27-year-old rich kid with a low Watt IQ who is striving to make his way as a property mogul and make his tyrannical father proud.
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This smoky members club is a suitably louche lair for the future president and the notorious lawyer and political fixer to make their icy embrace – Danish-Iranian director’s Ali Abassi’s hugely entertaining movie about the rise of Teflon Don and the fall of crooked Cohn never loses its oppressive sense of encroaching darkness.
You’ve heard of meet cute; this is meet cruel.
With a whip smart screenplay by Gabriel Sherman and two extraordinarily good performances from Sebastian Stan as the young Trump and Jeremy Strong as the venomous Cohn, The Apprentice is brash, funny and just relentless.
It’s an unsparing but not quite merciless portrayal of how Cohn mentored Trump and became the man behind the gold-plated throne. Cohn tells his new student how to dress, where to be seen, how to keep his name in the papers, and who to date. He has three simple rules for winning; “One: Attack, attack, attack. Two: Admit nothing, deny everything. Three: Always claim victory, never admit defeat”. But crusading McCarthyite Cohn also bequeaths Trump a warped sense of American patriotism, which the swaggering billionaire will later turn into toxic and blunt racism.
It’s a helter skelter ride through the New York of the seventies and Abbasi’s direction has the bleached-out look of Scorsese’s Mean Streets or any number of skanky thrillers of the era. However, as Trump transforms mid-way through from rent collector for his dad’s seedy properties to skyscraper mogul in his own right, we are ushered into the soft furnishings and VHS flicker of the greedy eighties.
Both Stan and Strong are superlative. At the movie’s start, a bewigged Stan is hapless but ambitious, stung by his father’s contempt, before he evolves into a megalomaniac with a taste for fake tan, liposuction and hair transplants. A reptilian Strong, so great in Succession, is cold and watchful as Cohn. He is often seen skulking in the shadows at his own extravagant parties and living a secret life behind closed doors as Trump indulges his egregious bad taste in, well, everything.
When he first meets diamond hard – and sharp – Czech model Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova, one of the best things in the film) he’s out of his depth within seconds. There are also bit parts for Andy Warhol, who is as money-grubbing as Trump, New York mayor Ed Koch, and a young Roger Stone (Robert Rendall), a future MAGA crony who is already living in a parallel universe all of his own.
Of course, Trump, currently running for high office again with all the bluster of a blockbuster sequel that could actually be worse than the original, hates this movie. He’s branded The Apprentice “FAKE and CLASSLESS” and called it a “cheap, defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job”.
By the close, the roles have been reversed. Cohn, a homophobic gay man, may begin the film as an éminence grise, gleefully dismantling his foes but by the closing scenes, he is almost human. Gravely ill, we see him fade to nothing and witness his final, horrified realisation of what he has created as Trump, now a towering man child, serves him one last ritual humiliation.
The former apprentice has become a pill-popping demagogue who observes his former mentor’s decline with a petulant curl of his lip. It is one of the film’s great triumphs that this power shift is almost imperceptible.
That old Irish political phrase “GUBU” comes to mind and while this story is indeed “grotesque, unbelievable, and bizarre”, it is not unprecedented. It’s just that very few practitioners of the dark arts have done political, legal and business hit jobs as well as this gruesome twosome.
That encroaching sense of darkness never ceases. And it could be about to get a whole lot darker.
The Apprentice is in cinemas this Friday, 18 October