Is it just my imagination, or is “The Apprentice” a pretty interesting movie?
Less than a month before a U.S. presidential election, you’d expect an 11th-hour Trump biopic (which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival) to settle for cheap smears and a bunch of propaganda. Such stuff is hardly restricted to the left or right. It’s that time of year, after all, for one of Dinesh D’Souza’s tributes to the man who pardoned him.
“The Apprentice” works a little differently. It’s an actual, conflicted and sporadically insightful film, dramatizing what made Trump Trump at an especially impressionable period in his rise.
Screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the Roger Ailes Fox News bestseller “The Loudest Voice in the Room” and worked on the subsequent Showtime series, confines “The Apprentice” to roughly 13 years, from 1973 to 1986. We meet Trump in his late 20s, collecting rent from aging or undesirable tenants in one of his ruthless developer father’s buildings.
A brighter future for the aspiring real estate mogul is just around the corner. At the tony Manhattan restaurant and discotheque Le Club (he’s the youngest-ever member), across a crowded floor one enchanted evening Trump catches the eye of the notorious attorney, political fixer and media addict Roy Cohn. He is there with his boyfriend who is not acknowledged as his boyfriend, because Cohn has learned to thrive in a deeply homophobic time, years before AIDS. His mantra in all parts of his life: deny, deny, deny. “The Apprentice” is about Trump’s co-opting of that mantra.
Early in the film, Fred Trump appears destined for defeat at the hands of the U.S. Justice Department over a racial discrimination housing case backed by evidence regarding his redlining of Black tenants. Ridiculous, Cohn mutters to young Trump, the one with the artfully wavy hair. Your dad won’t rent to Black people? No problem: “It’s your building. You can do whatever the hell you want.”
Cohn intervenes, and poof, no more legal trouble for the Trump family. Donald embarks on his dream project of a luxury hotel on non-luxurious 42nd Street. This was in New York City’s mean-streets years. The future president builds his flashy reputation on can-do, out-of-my-way optimism, or the appearance of it, built on mounds of debt, stiffed workers, bankruptcy and do-overs, always.
“The Apprentice” moves swiftly, with some clever production and costume designers doing shrewd work re-creating the period in accurately gauche style. (A Canadian/Irish/Danish coproduction, it cost a relatively modest $16 million.) The film stays close to the Trump/Cohn story within a larger, pencil-sketched framework of how Trump’s stern, disapproving father might’ve driven his brash, callow son to seek out a more encouraging, if ethically and legally bankrupt, mentor in Cohn.
Meantime, Trump’s older brother struggles with alcoholism that eventually took his life by way of a heart attack. There’s a scene in director Ali Abbasi’s film in which Donald, now married to Ivana Trump, chokes back so much anguished embarrassment for crying over his brother’s death in front of Ivana, their already faltering marriage dissolves in seconds, before our eyes. This comes after we see Trump at his wash basin, scrubbing his hands, hard, then harder, faster. If the movie were all hit-and-run jabs, screenwriter Sherman would’ve had someone make a joke about germophobia. Instead we see signs of it, without comment, in a private breakdown with no catharsis or snark.
Disappointingly, “The Apprentice” settles too often for broader, less illuminating touches, along with, yes, some snark. The performers save the movie from itself. As Trump, Sebastian Stan captures just enough of the familiar externals — the pursing of the lips, the frequent check-in with the nearest reflective surface to see how his hair’s doing — without doing an impersonation. Coming off a related, fictional weasel in “Succession,” Jeremy Strong doesn’t easily suggest the look or the sound of the real Roy Cohn. But he pulls you in anyway; his malice has wit.
As Ivana, “Borat 2” standout Maria Bakalova is terrific, subtly delineating what the film’s version of Ivana might’ve seen, or never saw, in her marriage to this outer-borough climber. The film’s most controversial scene depicts Trump’s rape of his wife on the brink of their divorce. It’s based on testimony, later recanted by Ivana; Trump himself has threatened legal action over this sequence, which has been revised since the Cannes premiere. Its inclusion in any form was threatening enough for the film’s primary financier to leave the project.
The surprise is that it doesn’t come off as pure exploitation. The earlier films of director Abbasi, who is Danish-Iranian, include “Border” and “Holy Spider,” as well as the final two episodes of “The Last of Us,” and he’s skillful enough to treat terrible behavior un-sensationally. Elsewhere, Abbasi and screenwriter Sherman are sincere, if unevenly successful, in searching for what may be impossible to find, at least in a two-hour movie: an answer, to what makes this person tick.
“The Apprentice” does better with simpler questions of what Trump gleaned from Cohn, and how Cohn’s instruction led to his success and eventually to the most gravely consequential controversy in modern American politics. Heavy matters, all right. When the film works, which is more often than I’d have guessed, it’s because the performers — including an excellent Martin Donovan as Fred Trump — lighten that load, while digging for small, revealing and actable truths of their own.
“The Apprentice” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for sexual content, some graphic nudity, language, sexual assault and drug use)
Running time: 2:00
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Oct. 11
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
