The Apprentice

The biopic is the shallowest and most simplistic of cinematic genres, and there are few subjects more ideally suited to it than Donald J. Trump. Penned by first-time screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, a fortysomething journalist who covered Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the author of The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country, the film plays like a supervillain origin story. But The Apprentice doesn't paint Trump as an idiot. Far from it. The film follows the young Donald Trump who, eager to break free from his wealthy, domineering dad, finds a new father figure in the legendarily cutthroat New York attorney Roy Cohn. The picture tracks how Cohn helped create the attention-seeking, corrupt real estate tycoon of the 1980s and how Trump outgrew Cohn and eventually surpassed him in terms of power, influence, and soullessness to become the icon who would eventually apply the lessons learned from his mentor to win the presidency of the United States twice.

The prospect of watching a fictional docudrama about a presidential candidate (or any significant politician) during an election year never appeals to me, especially one that seems like it's intentionally trying to look as ugly as this film does, so I skipped this when it was at my local cinemas. But the simplistic formula of the Hollywood biopic proves the best medium to explain Trump's rise and unique ability to stay relevant and beloved despite being a repugnant, morally corrupt individual who prizes loyalty above all else yet is the least loyal man to walk the Earth. For almost my entire lifetime, the media (from New York tabloids to the budding cable news channels to social media platforms and now all corporate-owned institutions, have loved and enabled Trump even as he's played them like the suckers they all constantly prove to be. Mainstream politicians, Democratic operatives, political opponents, law enforcement officials, and cultural commentators have been baffled for decades as to how this guy keeps turning potentially career-ending defeats into victories. But it ain't rocket science; it's the simple principles he learned from Coehn, which are easily spelled out in the first few minutes of this movie.

Sherman and director Ali Abbasi (Shelley, Border, Holy Spider) make all the smartest choices available in this genre, such as the way this movie barely lingers on the family dynamics and follows the "love story" between Donald and Ivana in a far less by-the-numbers manner than I expect from any biopic. Perhaps no choice these filmmakers made is more shrewd than staging the foundational scenes of nieve young Trump around Nixson's resignation, the incident that has shaped our current political landscape more than any other (except for Bill Clinton's disastrous Telecommunications Act of 1996). The political Right and Left learned two very different lessons from Nixson's resignation. The Right's takeaway was, "Never Again!" The Left's was, "We can take down anyone if we catch them red-handed," which worked for the first twenty of the last fifty years but hasn't been the case for decades despite what all the high-paid Democratic advisors seem to believe. For forty years, Trump's most powerful enemies have not brought a knife to a gunfight; they've brought articles of surrender, an autograph book, and a cell phone so they can take selfies. While they congratulate themselves on how well-crafted their surrender documents were and make fun of how goofy Donald looks in the photo, he continues on to his next destructive victory. Even this movie's title is clever, as it instantly recalls the reality TV show that took Trump's stardom to the stratosphere and primed him for the era when presidential primaries became full-on reality TV shows, but it actually refers to the mentor/protege dynamic between Trump and Cohn, which plays out like a TV-movie mash-up of My Fair Lady and Once Upon a Time in America.

As Trump and Cohn, Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong are extremely well matched. Stan is best known for playing Captain America's sidekick in the MCU, but he's no stranger to the docudrama, playing Jeff Gillooly in I, Tonya and Vlad Tenev in Dumb Money. Still, I was more than impressed by the choices he makes here, forgoing impression and mimicry in favor of creating what feels like an accurate portrait of the thirty-something New York wannabe entrepreneur. Strong, who starred in the fact-based dramas Parkland, Molly's Game, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 but will probably forever be associated with his portrayal of Kendall Roy in the HBO drama Succession, makes a full meal out of Cohn, a larger-than-life historical figure whose been memorably played by the likes of Joe Pantoliano, Ron Leibman, Nathan Lane, Al Pacino, and James Woods. Strong conveys an amazing arc for the tyrannical power player without forgoing his vulnerabilities.

The rest of the cast is sharply populated by actors without famous faces or names, with the exception of Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump and Martin Donovan as Fred Trump Sr., who both give, thankfully, understated performances. Indeed, the turns by everyone in this cast reflect the picture's lack of sensationalism in favor of telling its story without too much overt messaging. Sherman and Abbasi understand that nothing they put in their film could ever be as "damaging" as the way Trump has conducted himself over the past four decades, so they wisely avoid (mostly) painting their protagonist as a two-dimensional monster. Thus, we're left with a solid understanding of how Trump achieved what he's achieved and the principles by which he's lived his life and conducted his business, which has always been there in plain sight for everyone to see.