In The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi peels back the gold plating of 1970s New York to reveal an America composed of equal parts ambition and predatory cunning—think Gatsby’s green light flickering in the distance, but this time the dream has a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and the ghostly tutelage of Roy Cohn smoking in the corner. This isn’t just a biopic about Donald Trump’s rise: it’s an X-ray of the American id, and Abbasi seems determined to make us squeamish about what we see.
Sebastian Stan is a cunning bit of casting. He doesn’t fall into the snare of impersonation (we’re a nation oversupplied with Trump parodies), but instead constructs a portrait that is all attitude—that peculiar blend of brashness and insecurity that feels almost chemically engineered for the era of mirrored elevators and disco ball reflections. The real surprise, though, is Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn: all surface and rot, shifting between velvet seducer and viper. Strong captures the paradox at the core of Cohn—the man who could weaponize a whisper and, in Abbasi’s hands, emerges as the phantom muse of a uniquely American darkness.
The Apprentice lurches from boardroom anxieties to bedroom betrayals and never quite gives us a breather (did Trump ever, in life?). Ivana Trump, here, is not so much a love object as a prize to be acquired—her story winds through the script like a threadbare rug, tugged at and discarded when her purpose is outlived. The birthday cufflinks sequence—God bless prop departments that know the real story is always in the cheapness of a gift—lands with the weight of a SAT score sent home to a disappointed family. It tells us everything about Trump and Cohn without a line of dialogue: loyalty, for these men, is both transactional and, finally, impossible.
If Scorsese gave us the baroque operatics of mob life in Goodfellas, Abbasi offers a tableau vivant of American self-reinvention delivered through clenched teeth. The cinematography is thick with implication—part Reagan-era glam, part urban rot. The city looks both eternal and on the brink of collapse, which is surely the whole point. One thinks, watching the surgical scenes that seem lifted from an unmade Cronenberg film, of how power reshapes the body as grotesquely as it does the soul. When the score erupts into a bombastic wave of faux patriotism, you can practically hear the Empire’s death march blaring over the skyline.
But what keeps The Apprentice from drowning in its own cynicism is a nervous energy, a sense right beneath the stylish surfaces that everyone’s playing a part—except, perhaps, Roy Cohn, whose actor’s mask is finally fused to his own flesh. Stan’s young Trump is by turns magnetic and repellent, a bundle of appetites whose real feat is convincing us he believes the hustle even when no one else in the room is buying.
Abbasi doesn’t shy from the tabloid grotesquerie: the film dances on the edge of sensationalism, but isn’t that the only truthful way to approach this subject? After all, we live in the world these men built; there is no neutral ground. If the script sometimes blurs fact into melodrama, that may be the film’s underhanded thesis—when truth is as malleable as image, and image is the only currency, why not stage history as spectacle?
The Apprentice is less an indictment than a diagnosis, tracing a line from the feverish ambitions of a pair of ghoulish careerists to the current-day debasement of the whole notion of merit and meaning. The “Cohn playbook”—attack, attack, admit nothing, deny everything—echoes off the marble pillars and escalators, finally sounding like a dirge for the American project itself.
In the end, what lingers isn’t the tabloid funhouse of Trumpian excess, but the uneasy hush of a society that rewards power above all. Stan and Strong deliver performances so sharp you fear they might draw blood. The movie may be about Trump, but really, it’s about all of us—still transfixed by shiny surfaces, still measuring worth with the heft of a fake diamond.
The Apprentice doesn’t want to be loved, and that’s probably fitting. It makes you want to scrub your hands, and maybe that’s Abbasi’s final, bitter grace: he’s made a movie not just about ambition but about the moral residue left behind. You’ll want to look away, but—like the era it dissects—you can’t.
