The main problem with Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice is that the film is a character study with very little character to study. The latest Palme d’Or contender at Cannes this year is an enjoyably sleaze-slathered period piece about the 45th US president’s rise to power on the New York property scene during the 1970s and 1980s.
But the particular nature of its subject’s psychology renders the drama – how to put this tactfully? – rather short on depth and twists. Spoiler alert: the young Donald Trump was a cripplingly insecure and status-conscious wannabe whose big life goals amounted to getting rich, getting laid and worming his way into his city’s billionaire social elite.
“That won’t read well,” his biographer Tony Schwartz frets in a late scene, when Trump (Sebastian Stan) outlines his moronically shallow worldview. “But that’s the truth of it,” his patron shrugs.
Still, what the film lacks in revelatory insight into the Trump psyche, it makes up for in enticing context. Gabriel Sherman’s script centres on the relationship between Trump and his fiendish lawyer Roy Cohn (Succession’s Jeremy Strong), who first beckons the nervous young Donald into his sanctum when he spots him loitering in the corner of a Manhattan club.
The Apprentice shares its title with the business reality show, which Trump hosted and co-produced for 14 series, cementing his “alpha-mogul” myth. But here Cohn is the master, schooling his dim-but-hungry young apostle in the three rules for life he will later claim as his own: keep attacking, deny everything, claim victory always.
Strong is superb, making Cohn a goblin-ish knot of spite and self-loathing. But Stan’s approach feels too sensitive – given Trump’s total absence of hinterland, the role probably needed a caricaturist’s touch. Instead, the Trump we know is only glimpsed in a quasi-larval state: some of the body language creeps in towards the end, but the prissy mannerisms and dingbat cadence are absent.
His brutishness is shown most powerfully in later scenes with first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova), whom he treats as a sort of stepping-stone trophy; hot and glam enough for his hotel developer phase, but a tacky burden after that. And the alleged incident of spousal rape – a claim which Trump denied and which Ivana later refuted ahead of his 2015 presidential campaign – is portrayed in unambiguous terms, after he flies into a rage when she comments on his thinning hair and swelling waist.
This scene is arguably the only point at which Trump is framed as an out-and-out monster, but elsewhere, it’s as if his grubbiness rubs off on the screen. The earlier 1970s-set scenes, as Trump knocks for rent door-to-door for his domineering father (Martin Donovan), are shot in a grotty, grainy verité style, while the 1980s ones have the queasy sheen of US broadcast television, in which even gold wallpaper comes out the colour of earwax.
Can The Apprentice lob a spanner into Trump’s reelection campaign? Well, obviously not, since Trump himself is the spanner: as ever with him, the usual rules don’t apply. It’s worth watching for the light it throws on a relatively unknown chapter of his story, but doesn’t tell us anything that its subject hasn’t repeatedly told us himself.
Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced