With the re-election of Donald Trump, chances are close to zero that a  biopic about the President- elect’s earlier years will change the mind of anybody who already had an opinion of him– which is just about everybody. 

The film, “The Apprentice”, already faced trouble  before Trump’s victory on Election Day. A non-name director was brought in to direct after big name filmmakers – including Paul Thomas Anderson and Clint Eastwood – were approached and turned the job down.. Worst yet, its lead actor, Sebastian Stan, says his fellow cast members were nervous about doing one-on-one interviews to promote the film, fearful of being the public face of a movie most observers assumed would ridicule the once and future president. 

The film has struggled to survive, from its inception, because ultimately it was seen as a business risk. It eventually found a small distributor willing to give it a limited release before the election. Then, in mid-October, Trump himself slammed the film as a “cheap defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job” produced by “HUMAN SCUM” and claimed it was intended to hurt his chances at re-election and stop the MAGA movement. And now that the election has passed, the film is facing a backlash from both sides of the political spectrum. Perhaps that’s because,   despite Trump’s rage at the film and its filmmakers, v “The Apprentice”, directed by Ali Abbasi, actually seeks to humanize its subject, even if he’s often shown as the bombastic narcissist that the film’s likely audience believes him to be. 

“The Apprentice” presents Mr Trump when he was getting started as a real estate developer, looking to expand his family’s real estate empire from the outer boroughs to the glamor of Manhattan. Core to the film is its portrayal of Trump, who later in life would achieve global stardom on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” as the relatively young, acquisitive apprentice of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the notorious attorney who famously taught Trump how to win the power game: “attack, counter-attack, and never apologize.” 

When we first meet the fictional Donald Trump in “The Apprentice”, he possesses little business acumen and is weighed down because his social status is constrained by his father’s disappointment in him. Mr Cohn, a closeted gay man who’d been disbarred in the State of New York for unethical conduct, guided him to be relentless and to destroy enemies.  

“The biases of “The Apprentice” are out in the open. The film is written by Gabriel Sherman, a journalist who made his career, at far-left New York magazine, writing persistently negative (but largely accurate) reports on the activities of Trump’s other most important mentors, Roger Ailes.  Anyone familiar with Mr. Sherman should know that he caters to a very liberal demographic, the kind that loathes Roger Ailes, his brainchild Fox News, and Donald Trump. Naturally, connecting Trump to as loathsome a historical figure as Roy Cohn is the perfect way to appeal to this target audience. 

Mr. Sherman’s screenplay shows how many of Trump’s mannerisms derive from Mr Cohn’s teachings. The film also plays loosely with the truth. Real-life, 2024 Trump was particularly enraged that it depicted him raping his then wife, Ivana (the allegation was made by IvanaMrs. Trump during their ugly divorce proceedings, and she later disavowed them). In his denunciation of the film, real-life Donald Trump wrote that, “My former wife Ivana was a kind and wonderful person and I had a great relationship with her until the day she died. The writer of this pile of garbage Gabe Sherman, a lowlife and talentless hack who has long been widely discredited knew that but chose to ignore it.” 

When it was released, shortly before Election Day, it was assumed “The Apprentice” would be seen as a thoroughly anti-Trump film, written by a journalist deeply embedded in “the Resistance.”  But with Trump’s reelection – including a surprising  win of the popular vote – the entire “resistance” apparatus, including Hollywood’s power brokers, was suddenly deeply discredited. One could argue that, thea single rape scene aside, “The Apprentice” is accidently a pro-Trump film as it seeks to understand the events that has changed the future President, such as the death of his brother Fred Jr, a pilot who suffered from alcoholism, as well as his budding strengths as a business mogul who– how he saw everything as an opportunity to negotiate possible deals. Interestingly, Roger Stone, his sometime campaign adviser and persistent loyalist who played a big role in Trump’s early years, praised the film and, more specifically, Mr Strong’s performance as Mr Cohn, whom Mr. Stone considered a friend. Mr. Strong’s portrayal of Mr. Cohn, Mr. Stone said, was “uncanny” in its accuracy.

Indeed, in contrast to many political biopics, “The Apprentice” does make an effort to treat  Trump like a human being, first and foremost. And whether or not you identify with Trump’s politics, Mr Abbasi does show the audience that his subject may actually have human dimensions. He’s capable of caring for others, whether it’s for his alcoholic brother, Freddy Trump, or his  mother, Mary. The film’s shifting visual filters also prove to be a highlight, not only showing the overriding aesthetic of the 1980s, but often challenging the viewer by subverting Mr Trump’s appearances as he’s shown in other media forms. 

But whatever the positive aspects of Trump portrayed in the film, the film at its core (and in its title) portrays Trump as, fundamentally, the protege of Mr Cohn, a dark historical figure who, prior to his protege’s rise to great power, was best known for persecuting suspected communist sympathizers as the lieutenant of Senator McCarthy. Mr. Cohn’s guidance to Trump is similar to someone teaching an acolyte about Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” and its belief in  “making the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

Mr Stan achieves a small triumph in his portrayal of Trump, ensuring that his performance is not simply the satire that we’ve come to expect from actors playing the soon-to-be 47th president. The same could be said of Mr Strong who, as expected from the “Succession” actor, improves on his character by exploring his tortured psyche, but not holding back on the viciousness that defined him over the years. (Fun fact. This is the second time Mr Strong appears in a film featuring Fred Trump, the previous of which was “Armageddon Time”, whose liberal politics are far more overt than those of “The Apprentice”). 

While both actors bring a potent dynamic to the film, “The Apprentice” presents a study of contrasts that is critical to defining both characters. Mr Cohn seethes with ideological rage, and sometimes gets frustrated by Mr Trump’s undisciplined antics. 

In the end, “The Apprentice” is not the hit piece that Trump’s critics and champions both wanted it to be., Mr Abbasi manages to make the movie work on its own merits. And now that Trump is more powerful and dominant than ever, the film’s portrayal of that moment in time when the future president was himself an apprentice – to one of American history’s more notorious figures – gives us fresh insight into someone who, like it or not, is again the leader of the free world.