The title of Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice makes one think of Donald Trump’s ludicrous reality competition series, which resuscitated his career and indirectly primed his political ambitions. In the context of the film, though, the apprentice in question is Trump (Sebastian Stan) himself, introduced at the outset of his career as his efforts to establish his own real estate empire out from under the thumb of his slumlord father, Fred (Martin Donovan), lead him into the tutelage of notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).
The film wastes little time in positing Cohn as the Mephistophelean figure who shaped Trump into the figure we now know, taking a relatively nervous, insecure princeling and encouraging him to present a front of bullish, unrepentant narcissism to the world. Cohn imparts three golden rules for conducting himself in public and in litigation: always go on the attack, admit nothing and deny everything, and claim victory no matter the outcome of a trial or press war. Each of these mantras lands with the heavy thud of historical import, and you can see the lessons rewiring Trump’s entire outlook on life and giving him the confidence to stop kowtowing to his emotionally abusive father and take out his resentment on the rest of the world.
Stan presents Trump as a man still finding his voice in almost a literal sense. The actor punctuates certain lines with the embryonic stirrings of contemporary Trump tics, like the lilting pout of his vocal delivery or subtle versions of hand gesticulations that now accompany every sentence out of the man’s mouth. It’s comical turn without being too broad.
Nonetheless, just as this young Trump lingers in Cohn’s shadow, it’s Strong who immediately steals the show. The actor came in for some mockery late in Succession’s run for the surprise he expressed at discovering the show was a comedy. Such was his commitment to capturing his character’s pathos. And in The Apprentice, he approaches Cohn in much the same way that he did Kendall Roy, zeroing in on the man’s joyless, warrior-like need to win at any cost, understanding him as the sociopathic superego to Trump’s petulant id.
Whether Strong is in on the joke or not, there’s something to be said for playing this role straight at a time when so many satires like The Apprentice make nervous asides to the audience in order to clarify the point of their comedy. The full, grotesque force of Cohn’s pervasive infiltration of the halls of power through gangsterish intimidation and outright illegality shines through for how forcefully the actor portrays the figure’s soulless hunger.
Compelling as the film’s central performances are, though, they exist in a narrative vacuum that never builds anything out of our initial impressions of the characters. The arc of The Apprentice is confined to illustrating how Trump and Cohn become each other’s bête noire, each bully ultimately serving as both tormentor and victim of the other. Cohn relentlessly berates his protégé into shedding his nervousness and embracing boorish and confrontational behavior, giving Trump a surrogate father just as abusive as the real thing. As for Trump, he internalizes all of Cohn’s lessons with none of his finesse, cutting to the chase with a belligerence that humiliates his tutor as the latter begins to professional and personally fade in the 1980s.
The film never finds the right balance between its impulse to empathize with its protagonists and its clear-eyed assessment of the real-life harm both men wrought around them. Compared to the delicate tightrope that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America walked in feeling a pang of agony at Cohn’s succumbing to AIDS while never forgetting the outrage of his weaponized homophobia against other gay men, The Apprentice constantly veers between sympathy and judgment for the man. Elsewhere, we see Trump not so much outgrowing his youthful petulance as bolstering it with an arsenal of defensive tics that persist to this day.
Perhaps there are limits on how deeply a film can explore the psyches of people who so nakedly show us their worst qualities. All of Trump’s and Cohn’s grievances and fragile egos are visible at a glance, and there’s no indication that their lives would have been different had they not met. Like so many attempts to take down Trump, or simply knock him down a peg, the genuine article is so grotesque that The Apprentice can’t help but feel like it goes easy on him.
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