The story of how a young Donald Trump started his real-estate business in 1970s and ’80s New York with the helping hand of infamous lawyer Roy Cohn.

Timed for release just ahead of this year’s U.S. election, ‘The Apprentice’ is a biographical drama about Donald Trump in the 1970s and 1980s as he established himself with a series of real estate deals in New York City and the surrounding areas. Trump is an individual that it is virtually impossible to say much new about, such has been his omnipresence in our lives, American or otherwise, for the past 10 years and beyond, but in settling on this time period I think director Ali Abbasi has struck on something that works and this is a gripping movie all the more powerful for its resonance on the world today.

Abbasi’s movie attempts to tell the origin story of Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) and the events that turned him into the man today, largely by focusing on his attempts to establish himself as a real estate developer in the 1970s and 1980s with the support of his mentor, infamous lawyer Roy Cohn (an excellent Jeremy Strong) – hence the clever title ‘The Apprentice’. Alongside Cohn, the movie touches on Trump’s relationships with his father (Martin Donovan), his first wife Ivanna (Maria Bakalova) and his elder brother (Charlie Carrick), and I thought the transition over time in Trump’s character is well displayed, from an ambitious but fairly normal person (in the movie to be clear) to the shark he becomes by the end where his ego has taken over and all his relationships are transactional, even with family and friends.

The performances are what make the movie, with Sebastian Stan really sinking in to portray Trump not as an SNL style caricature, but as a real person with positive and negative qualities – the negative becoming more prominent as the movie runs on. In that there’s something important, as the movie has been inevitably criticised by Trump (who attempted to block the release), who has described it as a hatchet job (I suspect without seeing it), as well as folks on the other end of the political spectrum who have felt it is too favourable to Trump. For my money, I think Abbasi does a good job of removing himself from the hysteria of American politics to depict Donald Trump at this period in time, and it seemed a true and fair reflection to me. The other star of the show is Jeremy Strong, fresh off his award winning turn in ‘Succession’, and his depiction of Roy Cohn is oily, slippery with a hint of danger, and I hope this is the start of his movie career really taking off.

Abbasi makes use of newsreel footage from the time and political speeches to draw comparisons between Trump’s rise across the Nixon and Reagan eras, where latterly corporate greed was off the scale – and who better to represent that than Donald Trump. At times it can be a little too winking to the elephant in the room of what will happen to Trump in later life, but it’s hard to fully ignore that when it’s something Trump was asked about and mused on himself even back then. A movie such as ‘The Apprentice’ is always going to draw interest because the character at its heart is such a known figure who draws deeply strong opinions on both sides of the spectrum, and that makes him a difficult case study to tackle, but in Abbasi’s direction, Gabriel Sherman’s writing and Sebastian Stan’s portrayal, ‘The Apprentice’ is a movie that simultaneously entertains and horrifies, much like the man it depicts himself.

Rating: 4/5

Directed By: Ali Abbasi

Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Ben Sullivan, Mark Rendall and Joe Pingue

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt8368368/