“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?”

-Ayn Rand, “The Fountainhead”

“Take over the world when I’m on my Donald Trump shit
Look at all this money! Ain’t that some shit?
Take over the world when I’m on my Donald Trump shit
Look at all this money! Ain’t that some shit?”

-Mac Miller, “Donald Trump”

There are, conservatively, at least thirty million different Donald Trump impersonators worldwide, and fewer than .01 percent of them can do a decent job. Fixing a squint on one’s face, pursing one’s lips, leaning forward at the waist, gesticulating wildly with outstretched arms pivoting at the elbow (not the shoulder), tossing turns of phrase like “frankly” and “people are saying” and “you’re telling me this for the first time” – all of these actions do not a Donald make. Comedian Shane Gillis approaches it, and (not to give credit to SNL) Darrell Hammond had a decent one for a while.

However, in Ali Abbasi’s 2024 biopic “The Apprentice,” Sebastian Stan transmogrifies into the 45th/47th president with a sort of strange chameleonic intensity – a Trump out of a Francis Bacon painting, seen through a glass darkly. It borders, not on parody, but almost on kabuki theater; and when contrasted against Jeremy Strong’s sallow-skinned, dark-circled goblin-esque depiction of Roy Cohn, the whole affair comes off as deeply disquieting. You begin to feel, watching Strong and Stan go back and forth, like Hunter S. Thompson peaking on acid in a Vegas hotel lobby, as ‘70s New York and gilded ballrooms spin back and forth in a fugue of excess and paranoia.

“The Apprentice” tracks Donald Trump’s rise through the New York business world from the mid-70s until the Reagan ‘80s, with the film ending as Trump starts working with Tony Schwartz on “The Art of the Deal.” Along the way, he is aided in his rise to power by Roy Cohn, political fixer and attorney that notoriously “put the Rosenbergs in the chair.” Cohn, a closet case played to teeth-grinding excess by “Succession’s” Strong, helps (in the film’s version of events) bypass city taxes to get developments built, blackmails city council members with secret tapes of their indiscretions a la Nixon, and generally spreads a thin film of political slime over the whole affair until his death from AIDS in 1986.

“The Apprentice” attempts two things, with varied levels of success. It tries to, as one would expect, critique Trump’s actions in the ‘70s and ‘80s, while making thinly veiled prospective comparisons to his (at the time of the film’s production) singular presidential term. At various intervals, characters ask the young business magnate variations on the question “Would you ever run for president?” – to which Trump responds generally in the affirmative. At one point, Roger Stone shows up and references the Reagan campaign line “Let’s Make America Great Again,” at which point Trump says “I like the ‘again’ part.” (There is even, for the real Trump-knowers in the audience, a scene before Roy Cohn’s funeral where the Donald sips a Diet Coke with obvious relish.)

These are intended to be moments of dark foreshadowing, where the presumably left-wing audience trembles in their boots; they live in the present, they know that the guy erecting Trump Tower ends up taking the White House and destroying democracy as we know it, or whatever the current dramatic byline is.

However, these little quips reminded me more of the thing that the shittier Marvel movies try to do, where they make thinly veiled references to a comic book character the audience is assumed to know already and who will be showing up in a later film. “Iron Man, we’d like to talk to you about the Incredible Hulk Project,” or something similar. Kill me.

The second thing “The Apprentice” attempts to do is serve as a kind of fly-on-the-wall perspective to the chrysalis and metamorphosis of Donald Trump. When we are first introduced to the guy, he’s a young rent-collector for his father’s real estate empire, with very little sense of himself and even less individual success in the business world. There’s a scene earlier on, where Donald goes door to door in some Section 8 style flophouse in “Taxi Driver” style New York, trying to collect rent from schizophrenics, the unemployed, and the elderly. You half expect him to knock on Travis Bickle’s door at some point. Young Donald is browbeaten by his dad, scoffed at by New York city developers when he suggests converting a boarded-up skyscraper into a luxury hotel, and generally kicked around – until Roy Cohn enters the picture.

Cohn is depicted as this sort of catalytic influence, guiding his protegee from debaucherous house party to city council meeting, helping the Trumps beat a federal lawsuit, and eventually, ushering Trump into an Italian silk cocoon, from which the future president will emerge as the guy we all know and love: a swaggering, Gilded Age tycoon, with a combover and a Czech supermodel trophy wife. Stan’s Trump mannerisms gradually become more and more pronounced as this process happens – the “frankly” and “you’re a loser” gets played up, the hand motions become more evocative of the stuff we’ve all seen happen on the presidential debate stages, and in general, Donald becomes more recognizable as the stereotype we have created in our minds.

If you, as an audience member, tend to appreciate the Trump presidency more, Stan will seem to have accurately captured a braggadocious force of nature, the “drain the swamp” guy who shook off a bullet and pulled a Grover Cleveland a few months later. If you tend to have the opposite reading, then perhaps Stan’s performance will be more akin to Jeff Goldblum’s transformation into the titular insect in “The Fly,” or a kind of bronzed Patrick Bateman.

The problem with both of “The Apprentice’s” goals – critique of Trump the past and present, and chronicle of his rise to power – is that they are both stymied and belied by the fact that the guy won two terms! Every issue that the film raises – he’s a bully, he doesn’t play by the rules, he runs roughshod through the business world like a combed-over gorilla – are all probably true, in some capacity. Trump has never had a reputation for subtlety, nor for having a squeaky-clean personal life. But when “The Apprentice” points this out, it has to reckon (or rather, we as the audience must reckon) with the fact that, despite all of this, we elected him twice!

It recalled, for me, the 2017 Dick Cheney biopic “Vice” (which is perhaps a little ironic considering the Cheneys’ highly publicized dislike of Trump and support of the Harris campaign.) “Vice” was kind of stupid, but it swung for the fences and it had Sam Rockwell doing a Bush impression so it’s sort of a wash – and it had enough self-awareness to turn the ray of critique away from Cheney for a moment, and bring it to bear on the people that elected him, and the processes that made it possible for him to wreak so much havoc in the White House. It even structures itself in a similar way to “The Apprentice” – the Roy Cohn of “Vice” is Donald Rumsfeld, ushering a young Cheney into the hallways of power. What “Vice” at least attempts to do, “The Apprentice” never even tries.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; had “The Apprentice” tried to make some grand point about society writ large, it would have probably gone over like a lead balloon and had the same effect as the video of all the celebs singing “Imagine” during the lockdowns. What I’m trying to say is this: this comes off as a decent movie about corruption in New York and the rise and fall of Roy Cohn, and Donald Trump happens to be a focal point in that story. But whatever critiques it tries to make of Trump as a political figure fall flat when one looks at the last year of news. “The Apprentice” does not, and cannot, come close to the widely publicized visual of the future 47th president with blood dripping down his face, raising his fist in the air, commanding his supporters at the rally to fight. Sebastian Stan creates a very convincing parody of the stereotype we have all, to some degree, internalized; but having seen the guy talk in real life, the malice and sneering and general demeanor on display in “The Apprentice” are pulled from something else entirely, some kind of collective Trump that we have created out of whole cloth and Alec Baldwin skits.

As a side note, the other thing that liberal critiques of the Donald can never get right is that he’s an incredibly funny person. For my money, he’s our funniest president. “The Apprentice” never really gets at that; Trump is either befuddled, greedy, bragging, or angry for the movie’s whole two hour runtime. Let him crack a joke! 

“The Apprentice” is not a bad movie. At times, it is a very funny movie. At other times, it is a weirdly inspirational movie, in the Wall Street/American dream/greed is good/Patrick-Bateman-listening-to-“Walking On Sunshine” sense of the word. As an early life biopic, and as an exploration of the relationship between a Park Avenue Screwtape and Wormwood, it is compelling. But it is not, by any means, a competent critique of modern-day Donald Trump. Had it been released in 2016, it probably would have done gangbusters at the box office, among the Hamilton-listening, Samantha-Bee-watching, pink-hat-wearing crowd. But such is the way of things. To quote our current president – “Sad!”

Jacob Hersh was born and raised in Anchorage. He is currently studying law at the University of Idaho. He occasionally does movie reviews and writes weird columns for the Landmine to get extra money for beer.