It’s hard to know how much of The Apprentice is true. As directed by Ali Abbasi, it’s enough to say that some of it feels true. Any film about the making of Donald Trump has to do some heavy lifting in overcoming the man’s self-made mythology; it would also have to balance the truth against the narrative urge to make him and his mentor Roy Cohn into sympathetic figures. Abbasi succeeds more often than he fails on both counts—but only just.
From the outset of Gabriel Sherman’s script, it’s easy to dismiss The Apprentice because Trump is not a man who needs to be humanized. Nor does he (via his Sebastian Stan stand-in) need more camera time. Still, the details of Trump’s origin have a certain sleazy—and, let’s admit it, historically significant—allure. Accurate or not, Abbasi grasps this and revels in Trump’s New York of the 1970s and 80s, as both he and the city were on the rise. As a useful device, the film’s basic structure locates Trump’s inverse in Cohn, the powerbroker in gradual decline, played with all-out intensity (for better or worse) by Jeremy Strong. Paired with Stan’s subtle (yes, subtle) work, the two actors make the film interesting as its story follows the expected rise-and-unfortunate-rise narrative. What Abbasi reveals isn’t surprising, or even particularly deep, but in that form, it does match Trump, whose inner life and wealthy world contain less than meets the eye. And as the film gets more grotesque, like the man himself, it remains perversely watchable.
In all, The Apprentice‘s Trump is either an aspiring bumbler transformed by Cohn or he was always destined to become the oafish monster he is now. Abbasi’s film and Stan’s version of him, try it both ways to mixed results: true but muddled, obvious yet endlessly obscure. Maybe there is no real way to “explain” Trump, despite the film’s final satisfied air of certainty. Perhaps we don’t need to do it at all.
