The Apprentice: a frustratingly safe biopic of Donald Trump

• Reviewed from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. 

The worst kinds of movies are the ones that leave no impression at all – like The Apprentice, a mildly amusing, profoundly forgettable saga about the rise of Donald Trump. Maybe it’s an earned comeuppance that the former US President, the man of a million headlines, should receive such lackluster treatment in his first Hollywood biopic. The legend of his early years as a real estate mogul, so boasted about by the man himself, is here covered with a wet blanket. But that doesn’t feel intentional so much as the byproduct of the film’s generic rise-to-power narrative, which strikes me as a wobbly endeavour given that the US presidential elections are zooming around the corner. Maybe we’ve had enough mocking Trump content by sketch comedians and TikTok impressionists, but a weirdly grounded drama like The Apprentice also feels tonally off and annoyingly safe in the context of Trump’s ongoing menace.

The director Ali Abbasi (Border, 2018, Holy Spider, 2021) takes the Trump mythos and fashions a sleepy period piece, set mainly in Manhattan through the 1970s and 1980s. The film is remarkably inoffensive, charting young Trump’s Faustian deals with attorney Roy Cohn, shown as the origin of Trump’s turn to the dark side, his sensei in the ways of corruption and brute intimidation. Admittedly, it’s a relief that the film never stooped to cheeky, Adam McKay-style satire, though it does have a light comic throughline, tied mainly to Trump’s masculine insecurities. 

We see Trump (Sebastian Stan) repeatedly checking his fluffy blonde hairdo; attempting to keep a confident, straight face as Roy (Jeremy Strong) leads him through his skeevy world of political blackmailing and decadent orgies. In many ways, it’s thoughtfully written (by political biographer Gabriel Sherman) in that the story builds out the tacky, fast-food loving caricature of today in gradual steps, from a sheepish wannabe that feels recognisably human to a bloviating kingpin drunk off his own Kool-Aid. Unavoidably, given the subject, there’s also a built-in laugh track that’s triggered whenever the Trump of today is implicitly invoked. One can’t help but snicker when young Trump is compared to Robert Redford (even if Stan holds his own in the looker department). When Trump swats away an offer to run for public office, however, the winking effect feels stale – yes, we know what will happen, is that it? 

Trump’s evolving relationships with Roy and his first wife Ivana Trump (a disappointingly restrained Maria Bakalova) also track his spiritual degradation; where at first Trump is Roy’s weaselly pet project, and Ivana’s desperate suitor, by the end, he’s a sex pest and backstabber. Strong dominates the first half of the film as the tenacious Roy Cohn, a dead-eyed fixer with the kind of steel balls that Strong’s Succession character, Kendall Roy, wishes he possessed. Like an evil godfather, Cohn snaps Trump’s career into place, in part, as it’s lightly suggested, because he thinks the kid’s attractive, reframing Trump’s success as the incidental outcome of a powerful gay man’s crush. The story, once Cohn recedes into the background and Trump Tower hits Fifth Avenue, blurs into a patchwork of helicopter trips, new Trump property openings, and (at times violent) sexual encounters, Trump’s body degrading at the pace of his expanding ego. 

The Apprentice is essentially a villain origin story (which includes that subgenre’s questionable undercurrent of pathos), though the filmmaking is assured, with a moody and vivid sense of place and style. Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen (who shot 2021’s The Worst Person in the World) gives 1970s New York a conspiratorial grit, emphasised by Roy and Trump’s mobster-adjacent hangout spots — dim members-only clubs, half-empty diners and wood-panelled offices occupied by spineless politicians. In the 1980s, Trump’s star rises parallel to the kitschy coke-chic splendour of the decade, with massive pastel ballrooms and fluorescent-lit casinos echoing Trump’s tasteless extravagance. Watching a costume party is not without its pleasures, and the film’s attention to detail in its production design and fashion – Ivana’s sequined, shoulder-padded gowns; Roy’s leathery tan, silk robes and itty-bitty briefs – certainly offer enough decorative distractions to cruise through the film’s nearly two hour runtime. Still, a big cloud of whatever seemed to hover over the proceedings, diminishing each of the story’s big intended shocks: the premature death of Trump’s older brother; his assault of Ivana; Trump’s bigoted mistreatment of Roy, who dies because of AIDS. Of course this man is capable of such cruelty – we know that all too well.