Review: ‘The Apprentice’ is essential viewing

First things first: “The Apprentice,” now kicking up controversy in theaters, has nothing to do with the hit NBC reality TV series that Donald Trump hosted from 2004 to 2015, in which he eliminated one business contestant every week with the immortal words “You’re fired!”
Secondly, “The Apprentice” never touches on Trump’s political career, including his current reelection run for the White House. The film is instead a fictionalized account of Trump’s rise as a real estate mogul in the 1970s and ends with the 1987 publication of “The Art of the Deal,” the bestselling how-to-succeed memoir that first made him a household name.
It’s a hell of a role, and Sebastian Stan, best known as Bucky Barnes in Marvel’s “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” plays Trump with a blazing commitment that nails every nuance. Ironically, it’s Trump who’s the apprentice this time, eager to learn the ropes from Roy Cohn, the dark prince of a lawyer brilliantly and bruisingly portrayed by “Succession” Emmy-winner Jeremy Strong at his best.
Wherever you stand on the Trump divide, there’s no arguing that Stan and Strong deserve a place in the Oscar race since they burn up the screen. Directed by the Dutch-Iranian Ali Abbasi (“Holy Spider”) from a script by Gabriel Sherman, whose “The Loudest Voice in the Room” told the story of the contentious Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, “The Apprentice” is a cinematic bonfire.
The fictionalized Trump is sympathetically introduced in the film as a second son growing up in the shadow of a controlling tycoon father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), who cows him and reduces his eldest son Freddy (Charlie Carrick) to a useless drunk. His brother’s alcoholism gives Trump a lifelong aversion to the bottle.
When the Trump Organization is sued in 1973 by the Justice Department for allegedly denying access to Black tenants, it’s Cohn — instrumental in sending the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair for spying and in assisting Sen. Joe McCarthy in his communist witch hunts — who instructs Trump to sue the feds.
(In real life, the case was settled a few years later, in 1975, after Trump, who in settlement vigorously denied any discrimination at Trump properties, unsuccessfully attempted to countersue for $100 million.)
Cohn’s three commandments for success certainly stick with the screen version of his protégé: “Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; and always claim victory — never acknowledge defeat.”
It’s also Cohn who tells Trump to get a prenup before marrying Czech model Ivana Zelníčková (a dazzling turn from “Borat 2” Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova). The first thing to go in business, according to Cohn, is a working conscience.
Of course, it’s not long before the student becomes the teacher, especially when the reportedly closeted Cohn shows deteriorating symptoms of AIDs, though he claimed to the end that liver cancer was the cause of his woes.
Playwright Tony Kushner traced the same Cohn trajectory in his landmark “Angels in America,” though “The Apprentice” never rises to the profound level of that Pulitzer-winning play. In fact, “The Apprentice” shamelessly covers old ground, adding little to the myth and reality of the man who’s been in the media spotlight for most of his adult life.
Where “The Apprentice” triumphs is as a bitingly funny moral fable etched in acid and disillusion as its two extraordinary lead actors keep us riveted even when the script stumbles.
Strong finds a path into Cohn’s battered soul. And Stan, who’s having a great year with this film and his role as a facially disfigured actor in “A Different Man,” avoids cheap imitation to show us this version of Trump building a hard shell over his feelings.
It’s watching two great actors shine a light on Trump and Cohn in the process of inventing themselves that makes “The Apprentice” essential viewing. Whatever you think of this unwieldy movie, it’s impossible not to vote YES on Stan and Strong.