Monsters inc.: "The Apprentice"

Everybody gets an origin story, even the foremost monsters of the moment. So it is, with less than a month to go before a defining election for American democracy, that we end up sat before a film that seeks to explain where exactly Donald J. Trump came from. Written by Gabriel Sherman and directed by Ali Abbasi, The Apprentice shapes up as a Batman Begins with real-world repercussions, or a latter-day variant of 2002's Young Adolf biopic Max, which memorably found John Cusack as a Jewish art dealer appraising the protagonist's early work and life: "You're a terribly hard man to like, Hitler." Sherman and Abbasi posit that amid the dereliction and attendant social tensions of post-Nixon New York, slum landlord's son Trump (Sebastian Stan) found a mentor of sorts in the notorious lawyer and right-wing bigot Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) who proceeded to school our protagonist in the ways of the strongman. This feels like a relatively new angle: Trump as callow, suggestible kid, already moneyed but still in awe of others, possessed of some idea of legality, and having to do actual work for a living rather than merely making deals, or making shit up. This Trump hasn't yet fully metabolised his privilege, and hasn't yet learnt how to hide his insecurities and weak spots, drilled into him by his bluffly indifferent father Fred (Martin Donovan): a signature image, early on, has Young Don checking his (still fulsome) hair in a cab's smeary window. He's in construction, yet under construction, the guard still sometimes down, the golden facade of faux-success yet to go up. Cohn, for his part in this process, sees in this Trump a way of securing his legacy - and ensuring we're all still arguing about matters you'd hoped had been settled for good in the mid-20th century. He plies the kid with bonhomie and flattery, then alcohol, then ideology. When Strong, commitedly dead behind the eyes, spits out an aphorism like "none of it matters except winning" or "everybody wants to suck a winner's cock", it's Cohn, but it's also almost audibly Trump and Tate and every other chump on the Internet. The Apprentice is pretty sharp on how this poison, this ideological Drano, has to be forced down the gullet, whereupon it hollows you and any residual humanity out. You need a more resilient constitution than that of the ever-consuming Trump to resist.

As this suggests, The Apprentice is above all else an exercise in channelling, even ventriloquism, founded on the shoulders of skilful actors who've given themselves a lot to live up to. Strong, going toe-to-toe with the memories of Pacino's blowhard Cohn in HBO's Angels in America and the cadaverous James Woods in 1992's Citizen Cohn, recedes even further inside the character: no showboating, spittle-flecked ham here, just pure, unapologetic malevolence, tempered but slightly by a late-breaking battle with AIDS. (One peculiar yet effective physical tic, symptomatic of the consumption the movie describes: a gulping motion of the head and neck, that of a python swallowing in his latest victim, or a lifelong dyspeptic trying to keep down some of his bile. This stuff eats you up.) After his hilarious work in A Different Man, Stan sets himself the tougher challenge of accurately embodying arguably the most mediated figure of the century and getting us to listen to someone we might mute whenever he appears on the nightly news. Broken down, the performance is roughly 80% lips and hands (with a further 10% of superbly applied hairspray): the overemphatic gestures, forever promising more than can be delivered; the considered oral moues, threatening to do inappropriate things to every word, with or without their consent. If it's arguably more 21st century than 20th century Don, it's assuredly Trumpian in spirit, meshing who this guy was with who he was to become. (One reason Stan has skyrocketed over and above his leading-man contemporaries these past twelve months: a willingness to appear in less than heroic guises, to trade off his chiselled looks.) Around these two, we get Maria Bakalova, stalked by Baccara as Ivana, and lookalikes for Rupert Murdoch, Roger Stone and Andy Warhol: this New York, for all its disrepair, is also a petridish (or cesspool), a breeding ground for germs of ideas both good and bad. You need shit of some kind for these ideas to take root and flourish; and if all else fails, of course, you can always flood the zone with man-made BS. Is that why we emerge from The Apprentice feeling so unclean, in need of a long, hot shower? 

The main thrust of Abbasi's film - and it often does feel as brusque, possibly unwanted as a thrust - is an ugly business: at times, it plays like a buddy comedy between two men with no discernible sense of humour, and who thus have no idea how funny (most often: funny-strange) they are. One is a soulless husk as we find him; the other about to become far, far worse, perhaps the most insufferable man who's ever lived. (I mean, at least Hitler had his paintings to humanise him.) The Apprentice inarguably finds ways to immerse us in this world as it was at these times. Abbasi sticks his camera directly beneath his actors' chins, not so that we look up at them, rather to accentuate the dark hollows under Cohn's eyes and the soft, swelling paunch of the Trump jawline; he adopts a flat 1980s video look as we leave the disco era's shabby glamour behind, and tacks on slasher-movie synths. But the film is immersive in the same way slurry can be immersive, and not above the odd dirty trick of its own. We know this fumbling, bumbling Trump has reached the nadir he's heading towards when he subjects Ivana to sexual assault - here is the dominance Cohn has spent the movie drilling into him - so you can only grimace when Abbasi cuts away from the attack to the protagonist's latest erection, a phallic casino jutting out of the Nevada desert. Here, an otherwise shrewdly skeezy project succumbs to the Ryan Murphification of popular culture, in which even the most heinous behaviour is reframed as a sniggering joke, and our films and shows appear as shameless and sensation-hungry as the people they're documenting. There is, granted, both electoral and comic value in showing us Trump before he rebranded as The Don, when he was closer to Donald the Dork: socially awkward, mollycoddled, more than slightly weird. (One takehome: how those most hung up on winning are often sorely maladjusted losers.) Yet The Apprentice also feels like an origin story for the mire in which we're currently wallowing; a lot of the laughs here die on the lips, pursed or otherwise puckered, because we're all too aware what lies in wait for us in the real world once the house lights come up. Lots to admire, not least those performances, and you can't help but wonder what difference a film like this will make at the ballot box - but it is, finally, a terribly hard film to like.

The Apprentice is now showing in selected cinemas.