Roy Cohn, the closeted scourge of communists and homosexuals during Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, has previously been fictionalised and hung out to dry in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and National Lampoon’s Roy Cohn in Hell comic strip.
The Apprentice, which lists Ireland’s Tailored Films among its producers and is showing in competition at Cannes film festival, zooms in on Cohn’s twisted mentorship of a young Donald Trump. The shadow of Succession falls long over Ali Abbasi’s controversial biopic, not least in the casting of Jeremy Strong as the vulpine Cohn.
Sebastian Stan, who does fine work incorporating Trump’s mannerisms without slipping into parody, can only bumble in Cohn’s presence when they first meet at a members’ club in New York. Trump, a rent collector for his father’s property portfolio in a dilapidated city, wants to build a luxury hotel near Grand Central Station. Cohn has the nefarious legal skills to help.
A ruthless mentor, he teaches Trump three essential rules: “Attack, attack, attack. Admit nothing, deny everything. Always claim victory and never admit defeat.” In common with many comic books, the dark master, soon enough, is mastered. Trump grows brasher and stronger as Cohn, enfeebled by Aids and federal investigations, visibly weakens. The decline of the commanding Cohn dovetails with a dip in the film’s dramatic impact.
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Watching how The Apprentice plays in the United States’ polarised political landscape will be intriguing. The younger Trump recalls nothing if not the ditzy heroines of young-adult franchises, a harmless haplessness that will not play well with the blue states. The third-act inclusion of a marital-rape scene inspired by Ivana Trump’s divorce deposition – a claim she later retracted – will likely outrage Republicans (and possibly lawyers).
Working in Academy ratio with archival inserts, the film’s cinematographer, Kasper Tuxen, and editor, Olivier Bugge Coutté, re-create the late 1970s and 1980s to a series of loudly banging tunes selected by David Holmes.
The economical script by Gabriel Sherman, an award-winning biographer and journalist, often strays into a revision of the established story: “You have a face like an orange,” Ivana (Maria Bakalova, in a fun performance that lacks the statuesque presence of the first Mrs Trump) yells during a bust-up.
Abbasi has a strong Cannes game. He won the Un Certain Regard award with the disturbing troll picture Border in 2018. Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the star of the Danish-Iranian film-maker’s impactful serial killer drama Holy Spider, was named best actress on the Croisette in 2022. The Apprentice lacks the gravitas or impact of those earlier films, but it’s a pleasing enough doodle thanks to Stan, Strong and a lot of period wigs.
