The Apprentice Gets Dumber the Longer It Goes On

Director Ali Abbasi’s portrait of a young Donald Trump never lives up to its strongest performance: Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn. Photo: Cannes Film Festival

This review was originally published out of the Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 2024. We are recirculating it now that The Apprentice is in theaters.

This time, those hangdog eyes shine like little pools of predatory menace; the wide-open mouth, the slight forward hunch of the neck suggest a beast curious about its next meal. Thanks to his role on Succession, Jeremy Strong has in the last few years become one of our most familiar faces, but he remains an emotional chameleon, able to quickly project a single, precise feeling and, in the next minute, its opposite, with only the slightest of shifts. As Roy Cohn, the notorious right-wing lawyer who took a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) under his wing in the 1970s, Strong fixes all the attention in The Apprentice on himself, the way that he seems to direct his own penetrating gaze at his latest quarry. We watch him watching Trump, and we wonder what he might think of us.

If only the film were up to the challenge of matching Strong’s gaze. Directed by Ali Abbasi and written by Gabriel Sherman (a former New York Magazine writer and editor who spent years covering the rise of Trump and the meltdown of Fox News), The Apprentice is a hodgepodge of scenes from the life of Trump and Cohn with little emotional fluidity. It does start off strong, with Cohn meeting the inexperienced young developer in a restaurant in the early 1970s, as a lonely Donald looks around awkwardly while his date steps away. There is something quaintly touching about these early scenes, which manage to briefly humanize Trump. We see the way his straight-arrow dorkiness is pulverized and reshaped by the imperious Cohn.

Donald’s real bane is his cruel, racist monster of a father, Fred (Martin Donovan, scarily unrecognizable and just plain scary), who terrorizes his kids in an effort to turn them into “killers” (a.k.a. “winners”). The oldest kid, Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick), already an alcoholic but also possessing a natural bonhomie Donald lacks, bears the brunt of dad’s ire. Early scenes suggest, promisingly, that the film might pursue Donald and Fred Jr.’s own fraught story. Alas, the film only periodically checks in on that relationship, with Fred Jr. drunkenly staggering back into Donald’s life only a couple more times. This most tragic member of the Trump family thus becomes a mere narrative device.

Fred Sr. distrusts Cohn and warns his son away from him. (“He’s been indicted three times,” he exclaims to Donald — a laugh line, of course, for anyone who knows that Donald Trump was himself indicted four times in 2023 alone.) But Cohn, who has government contacts and a huge back room full of blackmail material on judges, senators, and anyone else he needs to influence, is too tempting a partner for Donald. With his refusal to let anything stand in his way, Cohn is the cheat code the obedient pushover son needs to win his father’s approval. What is Donald to Cohn? Another obedient client, perhaps? (“I don’t work for my clients, my clients work for me!” Cohn yells at one point.) Or maybe another decent-looking guy to have around. There’s a sexual power to the lawyer’s fascination with Trump that Strong layers in nicely, again largely through the power of his stare.

These early scenes set in the 1970s are shot with warm, shadowy interiors, replicating the celluloid look of period films. As the picture jumps forward to the 1980s, it takes on a lo-fi video flicker as well as shaky camerawork and choppy editing that recalls reality TV. The timing doesn’t necessarily work (the so-called “reality-TV revolution” came much later), but the garbage world of reality TV is of course what eventually returned the once-defeated Trump to relevancy, transforming him into a modern celebrity the way it’s turned so many unspeakable idiots into 21st-century cultural icons. Anyway, it’s one of the few good ideas Abbasi has here. But unlike everything else in the film, it’s probably too subtle to really hit.

Unfortunately, this movie, too, gets dumber as it goes along. It doesn’t help that Cohn is sidelined as he was in real life. Strong is the film’s (sorry) strongest asset, and whenever he’s not onscreen the whole thing loses much of its energy. Instead, we watch as the increasingly powerful Trump, now married to former model Ivana (Maria Bakalova), whom he wooed aggressively (and even somewhat charmingly) in the ’70s, begins to take on more and more of the qualities we now associate with him: His empty, hyperbolic statements; his increasing disgust with the world; his cruelty. Stan does a good Trump, but in so doing, he becomes less interesting as the film goes on; he tries to give Trump a human hesitancy in the earlier scenes, but eventually descends further and further into caricature.

And who can blame him? The film pretty much abandons the character and his story to signposts from now-familiar revelations: his adulteries, his ignoring his kids, his stiffing of workers, his collaboration with the mob, his diet pills, his hair treatments, his rape of Ivana. Along the way, we get appearances from Rupert Murdoch (Tom Barnett), Ed Koch (Ian D. Clark), Andy Warhol (Bruce Beaton), and Roger Stone (Mark Rendall), who, having gone from essentially being Cohn’s cabana boy to a GOP campaign strategist, tests out one of Reagan’s 1980 slogans on Trump: “Let’s Make America Great Again.”

The problem isn’t the fact that the film includes this stuff; it’s that it neglects the connective tissue that might make this character make sense as a person. (Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush biopic, W., had a similar problem, so the problem likely lies with this particular subgenre.) Trump is a monster, we get that, and we certainly don’t need a human portrait of this rough beast as he slouches his way to the White House again. But films do have to justify themselves on some level. At his premiere, Abbasi talked about tackling the rising tide of fascism head-on, but I’m not sure this choppy dress-up picture does that. And at some point we might wonder why we’re spending two hours watching a movie that, as it goes on, starts to feel more and more like a fancy, vaguely arty Saturday Night Live sketch that refuses to end.