'The Apprentice' Is An Instant Classic Of NYC Grime
Everything in this pseudo-biopic of Donald Trump looks gross and grimy, and that's why it works.
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When I first heard that there was a movie called The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump, I was, probably like a lot of people, understandably lukewarm at the prospect of the world’s most overexposed man getting even more earned media. Luckily I figured out that The Apprentice was also directed by Ali Abbasi, the Iranian-Danish director of 2018’s fantastic and underseen Border. I say luckily, because The Apprentice, passed over by all of the major distribution companies after its festival run and ultimately released by Briarcliff Entertainment, turns out to be something like a modern classic: a stomach-churning must-see take on the formation of the Trump persona.
Perhaps the first key to The Apprentice’s ultimate success is that Abbasi does what so few commentators (and I include myself in this) have been able to do: he eschews playing Trump for easy comedy.
With Trump, the temptation to make jokes is simply too strong not to, even to people not generally comedically inclined. He’s one of those public figures who’s impossible not to imitate when quoting, who arrives at comically inept public appearances smeared in clown makeup, whose series of inflections and psuedo-character voices are almost as recognizable as Adam Sandler’s. Not to mention all the tics (“millions and billions,” the late-great Hannibal Lecter, etc.). Just yesterday, Trump quit mid-rally to just stand up onstage bopping to music, an image I found so enchantingly bizarre that I kept sending videos of it to friends.
Comedy is generally about finding the humanity in our own worst impulses, a recognition of shared shittiness. “No hugging, no learning,” as goes the famous Seinfeld adage. We rarely laugh at selflessness, personal sacrifice, or generosity of spirit. Donald Trump, in constantly seeming like all of our worst impulses and national stereotypes personified, is thus effortlessly, consistently hilarious, regardless of whether he intends to be or not. As such it’s nearly impossible not to play him for the clown.
And yet Ali Abbasi (with a script by Gabriel Sherman) plays Trump for maximum nausea instead. It’s devastatingly effective. Abbasi gives us the rise of Trump as something approaching body horror, in an atmosphere of drab, Earth-toned 70s and 80s ick, which makes it an instant entry into the pantheon of New York Grime. The Apprentice feels like a kind of satirical hero’s journey for a powerful industrialist in the Robocop or Running Man universes. If Paul Verhoeven had directed a biopic of a public figure with production design by the Safdie Brothers, it might look something like The Apprentice.
The Apprentice, a sort of satirical twist on the name of the competition reality docu-series that helped make Donald Trump nationally famous, is actually not based on the television show, but on Trump’s relationship with infamous lawyer/fixer/dirty trickster Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong from Succession. The story begins in 1973, when Donald Trump is just a rich kid trying desperately to become famously rich. He dreams of becoming the type of rich guy who appears on the covers of magazines, striking that one huge deal that puts his name in the papers as something other than a footnote to his famous slumlord father. Every scion of a mafia family or offspring of successful ethnic whites dreams of one day going legit and being accepted into WASP society. First you get the money, then you get the respectability.
Meanwhile, the entire Trump organization is presently in danger of insolvency, on account of a housing discrimination suit filed against them for not renting to Black people. Donald meets Cohn, the first lawyer he’s talked to who seems to want to fight rather than settle, and he’s instantly intrigued. Cohn goes on to become his mentor in the dark arts of Machiavellian shitheeldom. The student eventually surpasses the master, and that’s basically the movie.
The author John Dolan once wrote a scathing takedown of The Corrections that I’ve thought about periodically ever since, in which he alleges that “Manhattanites are the real hicks.” Something about this take on America’s greatest city, as a place that’s better understood as clannish and provincial, rather than cosmopolitan and monumental, has the ring of truth to it, especially as it relates to the clique of NYC-famous public officials. The real “only in New York” story is Eric Adams taking all of his connecting flights through Istanbul as a bribe in exchange for allowing the Turkish consulate building, whose windows were falling out and smashing onto the sidewalk 17 stories below, to open without inspections. With New York stories, to miss the pettiness is to miss the point.
This isn’t the only perspective on New York, of course, every city contains multitudes, but it’s one that has a particularly attractive legacy on film. New York Grime. Scorsese did it beautifully (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver), Todd Phillips copied Scorsese doing it, and even that was pretty good. As for modern purveyors of New York Grime, certainly no one touches the Safdie Brothers, from Heaven Knows What to Good Time to Uncut Gems, extending even to some of the projects they’ve produced, like Funny Pages and Telemarketers. I have a soft spot for any depiction of New York as a disgusting place full of slimy hucksters, and The Apprentice fits wonderfully into the genre.
As the film depicts it, Trump was a relatively “normal” guy when he met Roy Cohn at a social club in 1973. Yes, he was essentially fighting for the right not to rent to Black people (“You’re allowed to rent to anyone you want to, this is America!” as Cohn puts it in their first meeting), but the young Trump still had identifiably human desires: like love, or something like it, for women (Maria Bakalova from Borat 2 plays Ivana), a need for recognition from his father; and shame, over his alcoholic brother, Freddy (Charlie Carrick), who is much less able to deal with their father’s extremely conditional love than Donny.
Cohn, a barely-closeted gay man who had helped prosecute the Rosenbergs, among other things, sees in Trump both a sexually attractive younger man and a potential protégé (an “apprentice,” you might say). He also catches Trump at a particularly vulnerable moment. For a guy who comes from a tremendously screwed-up family that essentially regard “trauma” as a Jewish plot like the Trumps, a self-hating Jewish homosexual like Cohn, who defends entrenched power at all costs and externalizes any threat to his self-perception, is something like Trump’s perfect false idol. In teaching Donald to deny any tender feelings (“the truth is whatever I say it is”), Cohn gives him exactly the kind of emotional armor he can use to avoid feeling guilty over his business, grief over his brother, or abandoned by his father. The kind of armor for feeling anything at all, really.