The Apprentice review - from chump to Trump

It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The Apprentice, a drama about Donald Trump’s rise to fame and gain.

There will be many more Trump biopics over the coming century, but this early contender (leaving aside the Funny or Die spoof of 2016, which no one is laughing at now) is a venomously good start. Republicans have attacked its release date, three weeks from the 2024 election, as dirty pool, but Democrat viewers will be given the greater heebie-jeebies.

For all of Trump’s fatuities on display here – via a pin-sharp portrayal of him by Sebastian Stan – there were just a handful of nervous laughs at the screening for media people I attended. No one enjoys a parody of tigers when you’re deep in the jungle, which is the feeling many have before November’s noose-tight poll, in a back-to-front world for liberals where watching an interview with Liz Cheney has a calming effect on them.

The movie has a classic bad education plot, pacing out the way that the pit-viper New York lawyer, Roy Cohn, groomed Trump in the wiles and ways of mendacity and mean, starting in the early 1970s. Trump at this stage is wetter behind the ears than Snoopy at bath-time as he collects morsels of rent from his dad’s dowdy blocks of flats in Queens; he’s a flabby piece of clay waiting to be moulded. Cohn came to most people’s attention at the dark heart of Tony Kushner’s landmark play Angels in America (1991-93), so screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, director Ali Abbasi and Jeremy Strong as Cohn have a tough act to follow.

They succeed with aplomb, and Strong explodes onto the screen as a tight-suited, sour-faced polecat laying out his amoral bible for advancement – play the man, not the ball; admit nothing, deny everything; attack, attack, attack. His clients work for him, not the other way round, he explains to the jejune, unhip Donald from his lair in a Manhattan club.

Cohn is soon fending off a case brought on behalf of Black tenants against discrimination in Trump housing and clearing away tax hurdles to Donald’s plan for a gleaming hotel in scuzzy 42nd Street. This attempt to bring life back to bankrupt New York, plus Donald’s ardent pursuit of his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), are early character pluses for him, later to be swept away as the story advances to the creation of Trump Tower and disastrous casino schemes in Atlantic City.

Cohn tutors Trump in the motor-mouth media skills that are to become his trademark, as Sebastian Stan brilliantly transforms him from chump to the pouting peacock we know today. All the while, Cohn’s strength and iniquity is sucked into the other man, as the J. Edgar Hoover-like Cohn – a gay-decrying gay man – succumbs to AIDS.

The project at times has the feel of a well-played HBO TV movie, an hermetic album of expositional scenes featuring bold-faced celebrities rather than deep, unified drama about the harm done to the world at large – a phantasmagoria for media folk. (The most laugh-out-loud scene is when Donald fails to know who Andy Warhol is at a party.) But the supple camera of Iranian director Abbasi, whose last film was the merciless Iran-set Holy Spider, takes us on a fine visual ride from a sodium-lit, indie-film 1970s to a gumball-coloured pop-video 1980s, as the cabined teak-and-ormolu world of Cohn giving way to Trump’s expansive Louis XVI style. (The production designer is Aleks Marinkovich.)

With two fantasy Gotham villains, The Joker and The Penguin, on our screens at the moment, it’s tempting to see these new portrayals of Trump and Cohn as chilling real-life analogues. Colin Farrell’s TV Penguin is the sociopath with the greater inner life and redemptive qualities, and it’s Jeremy Strong’s marvellous Cohn who turns out, against the odds, to have the warmer blood here: he’s shattered by the death of his long-term lover, and tries to hold out some love to Donald as his health and influence tanks, and he starts to resemble some decrepit Dickensian retainer.

Trump sloughs off Cohn with maximum rancour, while raping Ivana and trying to defraud his dementia-struck dad (Martin Donovan). It’s too early, right now, to look back in humour on any of the Trump madness, and the filmmakers would probably rather we never did. It may ironically be that a Trump victory in next month’s election makes this film more likely to score with Oscar voters – but you half-wonder if the people behind the movie would happily trade statuettes for their subject’s final comedown.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk