Golden days of the 80s: Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump and Sebastian Stan as Trump. Photo / supplied
Golden days of the 80s: Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump and Sebastian Stan as Trump. Photo / supplied
This biographical drama of Donald Trump’s rise to infamy boasts two stunning lead performances and a style that takes the viewer back to the golden days of the carefree, corrupt and callous 80s.
As Trump, Sebastian Stan (Pam & Tommy) doesn’t quite have the face, but he nails the gaitand vocal intonation to deliver a terrific portrayal of the man with whose image we are now all too familiar.
Early on, Stan brilliantly captures Trump’s innate insecurity as a young businessman, desperate to impress his cruelly unimpressible father Fred Trump (a superb Martin Donovan) and chatting up vapidly pretty girls with his trademark repetitive nothingness.
Trump soon inveigles his way into the inner circle of ruthless lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong from Succession, outstanding) who takes the younger man under his overly tanned wing and teaches him his personal tenets for success: Attack, attack, attack; deny everything; never admit defeat. Later in the film, we hear Trump passing this philosophy off as his own.
If this all sounds like convenient character assassination written with the benefit of hindsight, rest assured that Ali Abbasi’s storming biopic was fact-checked to death, though this didn’t ward off distribution struggles and threats from Trump’s legal team.
The sharp, clever script was written by Vanity Fair journalist Gabriel Sherman, whose biography of Fox News president Roger Ailes became the #MeToo miniseries The Loudest Voice. With Trump, Sherman focuses on the young apprentice who becomes the narcissistic bully who ultimately rejects his friend and mentor.
With its period aesthetic and edgy, hand-held camerawork, The Apprentice is quite a ride. Some scenes are shocking (again: based on fact) and like all good movies where sleazeballs live large, there is something intoxicating about entering Cohn and Trump’s ghastly world.
It isn’t likely to teach us anything we didn’t know already but it’s a brilliantly acted and produced insight into some of Trump’s frailties and one key relationship we can blame for getting him to where he is today.
