The Apprentice (2024) – Dump Trump

Released: 10th October 2024
Seen: 28th January 2025

Donald Trump is one of the worst human beings ever to set foot on planet Earth. He’s a racist, a sexist, a bigot, a fascist, a probable tax cheat, an adjudicated sexual abuser (I want to call him a rapist but apparently you can’t call him that because, according to the civil suit, he only forcibly penetrated E Jean Carol with his fingers and not his penis so we’re going to stick with sexual abuse), a man responsible for the spread of so much covid misinformation that we will never be able to put an end to that disease even though we had the tools to stop it and that’s just referring to the stuff he’s done in the last 5 years. History books are going to write about this man in the same tones that we now talk about a certain German man who also had a really shitty hairstyle… but unfortunately for all of us, this absolute scumbag piece of shit got to be president because enough idiots fell for his scam which means his life actually has historical importance and so, like a lot of other presidents before him, Donald Trump gets to have his own biopic… fortunately, it’s a biopic that shows him for what he is: SCUM! (and yes, I put this up the top of the review because if this paragraph upsets you because of me insulting Trump, the film is going to do worse so you are warned… you’re welcome)

The Apprentice tells the story of Donald J Trump (Sebastian Stan) from his roots as, essentially, a slum lord working under his father who wanted to prove he wasn’t a complete piece of garbage by turning a run-down hotel in New York into a prestige hotel that he hopes will turn the town’s fortunes around. On the way he runs into the devil incarnate, AKA Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) who takes Donald under his blood-soaked wing and teaches him all that Donald will need to know to be one of history’s biggest scumbags, lessons that Donald will become an expert in as he is slowly corrupted even more to the point where he somehow will out-evil Roy Goddamn Cohn. Along the way, he’ll meet and marry his first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) who he will also… well, we can’t legally call it rape but it sure looked rape-ish based on how Ivana described it at the time. Anyway, we basically just follow Trump’s life up until he starts work with the ghostwriter for the book Art of the Deal that would elevate him from “Guy who owns a kind of fancy building in a shitty neighbourhood” into the man who has made the last decade of life miserable for so many.

So, yeah, I’m not a fan of Donald Trump. To be fair, I hated him before it was cool back when he was only known for his racism and general sexism, we didn’t know about the alleged rapes and he wasn’t a full fascist at that point but I bring this up to say that if you even slightly like Donald then The Apprentice will promptly disillusion you of that. It’s not a subtle work of cinema, the film opens with a clip of Nixon’s famous “I’m not a crook” speech in a pointed comparison between our current actual crook-in-chief and it somehow gets even less subtle from there. The Apprentice can’t help but be as blunt as a fist in the face, it’s a story set in the 80s with Donald Trump and Roy Cohn running around New York being evil cunts for 2 hours, you cannot do that and be subtle at the same time. Just by the nature of who the story is about you’re dealing with subject matter that could border on full melodrama in some hands, there’s a universe where this is almost camp for how insane things can be but with these performers putting everything they have into the reality of the situation and a director treating everything almost like it’s a documentary it keeps everything from going too far towards the cartoonish end of the spectrum.

What’s admirable about The Apprentice is that it doesn’t really try to make Donald seem like a decent person, there’s no sugar coating of what he is or an attempt to portray him as some misunderstood figure. It’s also not pushing too far in the opposite extreme, partly because it doesn’t need to (hard to present someone in a bad light when they’ve lived their lives like this man has) but also because it doesn’t want to just turn him into a cackling evil monster. It’s blunt about what happened, some of these things are verifiable events that are in court records that we know about and it presents them as fairly as one could in this situation. It shows some of his evil side sure, the scene of Donald straight up raping Ivana is a hard watch (for the record, in the real world she retracted the use of the term rape but never retracted the description of events which is presented here… so she didn’t call it that, but she described it pretty well) but we avoid more silly elements like stories of Donald Trump shitting himself because of the drugs he’s on or most of the other sexual assault allegations. It sticks to stuff it can verify which is admirable, certainly better than this man deserves.

What this man also doesn’t deserve is to be portrayed by someone as talented as Sebastian Stan who really does give a performance that demands awards attention.  In biopics you can either just do a great impression of a person or capture their essence, Sebastian is going for a mix where you can definitely tell he’s studied Trump and captured his mannerisms and how he speaks but the voice isn’t an uncanny vocal copy which allows Stan to adjust for the scenes as needed. It’s a performance that could’ve strayed into cartoon territory, we’ve all seen Trump impressions and most are spot on vocally but fail to make him into anything human but Sebastian finds a way to pull it off. He finds levels and layers in the evil, starting off kind of awkward and by the end, you’re flat-out ready for him to call a bunch of supporters to storm the capital because he’s reached his peak of evil.

Speaking of evil, Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn is truly something else. Fortunately for me, Roy Cohn died 2 years before I was born so I never had the disgusting knowledge of living on earth at the same time he was alive but I’ve seen enough documentaries to have a pretty good idea of how Roy Cohn behaved and Jeremy Strong nails it. You can see him plotting all the time, his mind always working on whatever evil shit he’s going to do next and ways to justify it later. It’s another performance that could’ve been so wrong, Roy Cohn was such an evil human being that it’s hard not to play it to an extreme and there’ve been many versions of him presented over the years (Thanks in no small part to the play Angels in America which has given many great actors a chance to play this long dead asshole) but Jeremy Strong found the reality of the man and presents it. Hell, he does the one thing that I genuinely thought would be impossible… he makes you feel sorry for Roy Cohn. It was only for a single second before I go back to being very glad that Roy Cohn is dead, but it was a moment and it takes a great actor to pull off that emotion.

Now while the two lead performances are what’s made The Apprentice stand out (and gotten it awards nominations, which is why we have to talk about it), it also helps that the actual film presented is fantastic. The style feels like we’re watching some fly-on-the-wall documentary at times, the 80s aesthetic is immaculate and carefully presented. For a film made in the last few years, it feels like it’s been hiding away for a decade because they were waiting for the lawyers to come around and stop it. It’s not holding back anything, it’s not trying to stylise its way around the material like Vice did, it’s presenting Trump as fairly as it possibly can and it just sucks that a fair portrayal of Trump presents him as a complete fucking moron with no redeeming value whatsoever… and yeah, I can appreciate that kind of bluntness in a biopic since they normally try to rehabilitate images of major figures but this one realised it can’t do that with this subject.

The Apprentice is brutal, a vivid description of the rise of one of the most evil political figures of the modern era. It takes no prisoners and lets the truly vile nature of Donald Trump hang out for all to see. It managed to take shit that we already knew about this man and make it shocking, thanks in no small part to a cast who deserve every single bit of praise they can get. It’s certainly not a film that his fanbase will enjoy, indeed I bet they’ll pretend everything here is just made up to be mean to him but fuck the lot of them. The Apprentice is essential viewing, a reminder that this man has always been evil and the only problem now is that he’s evil with seemingly unlimited power so maybe we should’ve seen all of this coming years ago.