Could the star-studded biopic detailing Donald Trump’s rise to fame in the 1970s under the mentorship of controversial lawyer Roy Cohn, set for release on October 11, be damning enough to rock the tide of the election? 

In spite of Trump’s claims that the film, aptly titled “The Apprentice,” is defamatory and threatens to interfere with the election, its early reviews suggest that it may be less of a smoking gun than it was hyped up to be.  

A “riveting if familiar account of Donald Trump’s years spent at Roy Cohn’s knee,” Entertainment Weekly reports; “We’re simply watching a well-acted TV-movie made up of familiar anecdotes built around the Trump we already know” writes Variety; “Ultimately, it doesn’t say anything we haven’t heard, and it doesn’t plumb the psychological depths,” avers the BBC. 

The film, directed by Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi and written by journalist Gabriel Sherman, debuted at the prestigious Cannes festival in May. It was then that Mr. Abbasi, in an interview, offered Trump a private screening of the film — which received an eight-minute standing ovation from audiences at the festival — even suggesting that he didn’t think the 45th president would “dislike” the movie. 

It was a gutsy comment considering that the Trump campaign has repeatedly tried to shut the movie down, slamming it as “pure malicious defamation” that “should never see the light of day” and is even undeserving of holding “a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store.”

After its debut at Cannes, Trump’s legal team slapped the producers with a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that the film defamed Trump and “constitutes direct foreign interference in America’s elections.” 

“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” Trump’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, said in May. “As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”

The film was rebuffed by many major American studios and film distributors — including Netflix, Sony, A24, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and others — before eventually being taken up by Briarcliff Entertainment, a company with a history of backing polarizing content. 

One of the film’s most controversial scenes depicts Trump raping his then-wife, Ivana Trump — a incident based on an accusation of sexual assault made by Ms. Trump during their divorce proceedings in 1990. She later expressed that she used the word “rape” not in a “literal or criminal sense.” Trump has denied the accusations. 

Mr. Abbasi, however, maintains that the film is “relatively fair and balanced, in terms of accuracy of character,” he said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “I think Mr. Trump, at the end of the day, is a very smart person” who “would appreciate a lot of the nuances here,” he added. 

The actor who plays Trump, Sebastian Stan, expressed a similar take on the film, adding that he has “actually” heard from “a lot of Republican friends who are very excited about the film.” 

The supposed well-balanced nature of the film was reiterated in Nicholas Barber’s review in the BBC, in which he writes that “the Apprentice is destined to be berated by many as too flattering or too unflattering.”

Not everyone is pleased with the film, however. According to reporting from Variety, a close friend of Trump’s, Dan Snyder, who invested in the production on the assumption that it was slated to offer a positive portal of the president, was said to be “furious,” when he saw a cut of the film back in February. 

Well, come October, it’ll be up to the viewers to decide — assuming Trump’s legal team doesn’t have it shot down first.