The Apprentice review: Donald Trump biopic humanises former president but that’s as it should be

There’s an interesting question hanging over The Apprentice’s commercial prospects – who is going to see this movie about a young Donald Trump’s early days storming the New York City business scene?

Donald Trump does not engender ambivalence. Those who adore him will have heard him call The Apprentice tantamount to election interference while those who loathe him will have had enough of the former US president without signing up for an extra two hours.

For the latter group, those at the point of exhaustion, the other question is: can you humanise Trump when so many view him as a monster? Is it responsible?

Here’s the thing about labels such as “monster” or “evil”, two words the tabloid media loves to trot out to describe murderers, child abusers, predators and terrorists, they’re reductive. They are emotive, shorthand words that seek to evoke feelings of disgust.

They also “other” the subjects as if they’re something less than human, because how could people, so-called normal people, possibly commit such atrocities? The problem with that is that it denies that humanity exists on a wide spectrum, and horrific acts are part of that.

They’re on the margins but that doesn’t make them not not-human.

Humanising those people doesn’t excuse what they did – or are doing – but it does explain them. It imparts understanding into all those aspects of humanity that make us uneasy or repulsed, and we need to understand them. Avoidance and denial only perpetuate ignorance.

Trump, for those who deem him utterly unacceptable with his rhetoric against immigrants, women, black people and anyone who disagrees with him — including Taylor Swift— is not a monster.

He came from somewhere, he was shaped by someone and, at one point, he wasn’t the person is he is today.

The Apprentice wants to explore all of that, specifically Roy Cohn’s influence on an impressionable, ambitious young man who was still under the yoke of his domineering father.

Cohn was a lawyer who gained a national profile working for Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s and was also instrumental in sending Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to the electric chair. He was controversial and unscrupulous, a vicious opponent, and was eventually disbarred not long before his death in 1986.

In The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi, an already status-obsessed Trump (Sebastian Stan) is drawn into Cohn’s (Jeremy Strong) circle during the time when the Justice Department was suing him and his family for prejudicial practices against black renters.

Cohn is the one that tells him to countersue, kicking off Trump’s now life-long preference for aggressive litigation. The lawyer also imparts pearls of “wisdom” Trump would later claim as his own – admit nothing, deny everything and declare victory even if you’ve been defeated.

In the view of The Apprentice, so many objectionable parts of Trump’s essential character now were down to Cohn’s warped philosophy, including that all-important malleable relationship to truth. Oh, and Cohn loved a solarium and an orange hue.

The film is a well-paced and often entertaining story of how Trump evolved from an insecure blustery young man into a still insecure and blustery older one, but someone with a greater grasp of how to manipulate others and egomaniacally impose himself.

He didn’t start as a narcissist and seemed to genuinely love Ivana (Maria Bakalova) at the beginning, but by the time the credits rolled, the version of him still standing is recognisable to the red-hatted one we know so well today.

Stan is able to render Trump as more than caricature or mimicry, and Strong is effective as Cohn, especially as he transitions from the dynamic pugilist to a much-reduced figure towards the end of his life.

It’s testament to Strong that he is able to draw empathy for someone history has already judged as a demon.

The Apprentice is not a perfect film by any stretch. It breezes through some things too quickly and it never manages to be immersive enough that you forget to compare what’s happening on screen to what you know about the real Trump.

But it gives you a decent sense of how Trump came to embody and influence the current culture of binaries – winners versus losers, strong versus weak. If the movie had worked along those same lines, if it just mocked, it wouldn’t be very interesting.

Humanising Trump, someone who, arguably, dehumanises others, is an exercise in nuance. It’s not a consideration he gives many but if we are to understand the context that created Trump, it’s one we should adopt.

Rating: 3/5

The Apprentice is in cinemas on October 10