The Apprentice (2024) * * * 1/2

Directed by: Ali Abassi

Starring:  Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan

The Apprentice tells a tale told many times before.  It's story is as old as stories themselves.  A mentor takes a willing pupil under his wing, only to have the student outgrow his need for his teacher, leaving the mentor in the dust as the student grows in stature.  In The Apprentice, the apprentice is future president Donald Trump (Stan) and the mentor is corrupt and powerful attorney Roy Cohn (Strong).  Neither person is meant to be sympathetic or someone to feel sorry for, but because the performances contain so many dimensions, we actually feel sympathy for Cohn when Trump inevitably leaves him out in the cold as he ascends into power, wealth, and celebrity which carried him to two non-consecutive terms in the White House.

The Apprentice takes place first in the 1970's, when Trump falls into Cohn's inner circle and hires Cohn to represent he and his father in a federal civil lawsuit.  Cohn takes a liking to the naive Trump, whose position in his father's real estate corporation is reduced to knocking on tenant doors in his slums to collect rent money.  He teaches Trump his three rules of business:

1.  Attack, attack, attack.

2.  Admit nothing, deny everything

3.  Claim victory, and never admit defeat. 

Trump has practiced those rules every day of his life, and we see it in his White House dealings.  However, it is ironic to see how defeated Cohn appears when he is battling AIDS and seeks out Trump simply for friendship and comfort.  By then, it's the 1980's, and Trump has become the symbol of the excess which defined the decade.  He has no more use for Cohn, and coldly discards him, which I'm sure Cohn did to many others in his lifetime.   However, The Apprentice is distinctly able to make this story fresh while making certain not to hate its subjects.  Director Ali Abassi's The Apprentice takes place in a different world than the disco era of the 1970's and the cocaine-fueled 1980's, although Trump's drug of choice is diet pills, which transform him into a cruel, nasty person who mistreats his wife Ivana (Bakalova) and spurns Cohn.  

The fact that The Apprentice is about Trump and Cohn adds another level of historical perspective to the story.  We see how the Trump we know today, love him or loathe him, was created and how he has obviously heeded Cohn's advice more so than anything else in his life.