The Apprentice has the hardest damn job of any biopic in recent memory. It’s hard to imagine the wildly successful version of the movie that resonates with most audiences. Donald Trump is one of the most hated and most loved figures in recent American history. Almost nobody gets to be both. To have any perspective at all is to totally alienate an audience and every movie has a bias. This movie has a strong bias. This movie is formally against Donald Trump and tries to explain how the real estate mogul was modeled into a force of political destruction.
They have us in the first half. The first half of The Apprentice is centered on Trump’s ‘70s and the Gabriel Sherman screenplay overachieves in this segment. It does so through the confident direction of Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi, who effectively tells the story in two parts.
Sebastian Stan plays our first genuine facsimile of Trump in the movies. This is not a parody or outsized theatrical performance for laughs. This is nuanced screen acting. It’s about all the little ticks and peculiarities of Trump. How he looks. How he acts. What he’s about. How his life changed significantly between the ‘70s and ‘80s when he met controversial lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn, played in peak Kendall Roy Succession form by Jeremy Strong.
Stan and Strong have this natural tension and chemistry, both seem to be working out of a place of method acting, and embodying their personas. You can feel Stan’s Donald Trump groveling at the feet of Strong’s Roy Cohn until there is this transfusion wherein he takes on the personality and the traits of his mentor (Trump being the titular Apprentice).
The movie then shifts awkwardly and headfirst into the 1980s. It begins to sift through easy iconography. It deploys Reaganism as a direct parallel to a Modern Trump. The Gabriel Sherman script embarrassingly tries to insert Modern Trumpisms into the backstory like it’s retconning a comic book. You can’t do that in biopics, it feels so cringe-inducing and formally redundant. We know who Trump is and the job isn’t to bring us to the modern day. The job is to portray a specific time and here the movie begins to flatline and become the super easy, borderline parody version again. It strays too close to the thing it was the exception for, and loses all of its momentum.
The other second-half problem is that the movie is really driven by Strong’s Roy Cohn as this larger-than-life persona. Once Trump has swallowed his personality and become the center of the story, the anchor of the tension dissolves immediately. There’s no longer any thrust to the story. It’s just Trump being an asshole. It’s predictable as hell and stops adding value where it was previously adding a lot.
Ultimately, The Apprentice, then, is a movie of two halves. One of them is distinctly recommendable and has a pretty good lead-support concept. It’s too soon for this movie and releasing it during election season can go badly — but Trump tried to prevent its release legally, which is very funny once you consider that the movie is about always filing a lawsuit and always being in the headlines, even when it’s bad. There’s no greater irony here, though, as the good first-half and dedicated performances are undercut by a flagging script that doesn’t understand how to finish the story. Perhaps waiting would’ve given us a better ending, but they’ve got to put it out now, don’t they? Let’s enjoy The Apprentice for the surprise of getting half an engaging biopic out of such a contentious subject. Like everything in American Politics, where there are only different shades of the same agenda: it’ll be like catnip to the people who would’ve always liked it and anathema to the people who would’ve always hated it. It’ll be a lot easier or harder to forgive The Apprentice’s second-half collapse, depending on the election.