The Apprentice is a dramatised biopic of Donald Trump, covering his early business years. He has called the film ‘FAKE and CLASSLESS’ and ‘garbage’ – but he wishes it well. I’m pulling your leg. ‘It will hopefully “bomb”,’ he has said. He hasn’t seen it, as far as anyone knows – I wish I could review films without seeing them; so time-saving – but even so, the writer, Gabriel Sherman, is ‘a lowlife and talentless hack’.
If Trump had not trashed the film, you could say it had failed in what it was trying to reveal, which is: why does he behave this way? Where does his attacking mindset come from? It’s an origin story, if you like, and I was gripped throughout. It’s brilliantly acted and conceived, and it takes its subject seriously. It’s not like an extended Saturday Night Live routine.
The film is set in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s and begins with Donald (Sebastian Stan) working for his father’s real estate company as a rent collector. His father has never made him feel worthy, is disdainful of him in fact, which makes him desperate to impress – desperate for success. (This is not laid on thick. This is what you infer from the scenes round the family dining table.)
Donald is ambitious. He’s already dreaming of Trump Tower. But he’s a no-mark who no one entertains seriously until he enlists the help of lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who had previously been Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and is now working for the Mob. I could write reams about Cohn (look up the nose job he was forced to have as a teenager), but for our purposes he’s a power-crazed, ruthless, amoral force who will stop at nothing to win.
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