Film Review: The Apprentice

5 Stars

By Joseph Beyer | March 15, 2025

While the glitter and shine from the 97th annual Academy Awards is still hanging in the air, and with geopolitical unrest all around us, allow me to button up this awards season with one last recommendation before the curtain falls (on the film industry and/or America respectively).

If you haven’t seen The Apprentice yet, you are missing two of the finest performances that didn’t win at this year’s Oscars and a riveting portrait of Donald J. Trump’s aggressive pursuit of wealth and power.

Not to be confused with the reality television show of the same name, The Apprentice has been one of the more fascinating and flinty independent films of the year. Debuting at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival to international praise, then struggling to find a distributor brave enough to take on this cultural hot-potato, it nonetheless persevered and is now available on multiple streaming and VOD platforms.

All this despite attempts to catch and kill the project, with the main subject denouncing it, “a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job.”

Written by journalist-turned-screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, (who penned the fictional treatise of Trump’s youth in New York City and his particularly fraught relationship with attorney Roy Cohn after covering Trump’s 2016 campaign), The Apprentice is directed with a vibrant punk edge not by an American storyteller, but by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi.

Abassi got the assignment after Paul Thomas Anderson and Clint Eastwood passed on the project due to business concerns about taking on an unflattering portrait of the now political leader.

But so ferociously talented are the two lead performances in The Apprentice (actor Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Cohn), that the film could not be denied, with both artists receiving Best Actor and Supporting Actor nominations at the Oscars, respectively.

While focusing on Trump’s formative years in the real estate scene of the 1970s and ’80s, the story explores the intimacies of his complicated relationship with Cohn, the notoriously aggressive lawyer who shapes Trump’s worldview and becomes his dark mentor. Cohn’s true life influence on Trump is well documented, but in The Apprentice it explodes on the screen until the tragic finale.

Stan’s portrayal of Trump’s fragile ego at work and his almost desperate attempts at attention explain in some part how we got here now, with a sitting president so hellbent on political revenge that he’s overseen the largest purge of federal employees in the history of our country.

In Strong’s performance, Cohn is a haunting pessimist who sees the world in black and black with no patience for those unwilling or unable to attack first. In Trump, he sees a dazzling white canvas he can shape and influence and a handsome young man oblivious to his darkest secrets.

Stan’s Trump soaks in all in and gradually makes Cohn’s ethos his own, adopting and changing it as he sees fit until abandoning his friend when he’s extracted all he needs from him. It’s precise and unnerving and calculated. It will repel you.

While it may not be a surprise that a dangerous portrayal of a powerful man has been somewhat suppressed by the mainstream, it was remarkable that Trump didn’t even get a name check at the politically-muted Oscars, in spite of being depicted as a character in one of the biggest awards categories of the night.

Perhaps the performances in The Apprentice hit a little too close to home, or Hollywood was a little too on edge…or a little too afraid. Thankfully, the film is not, and I hope you’ll seek it out.

Rated R for the sleazy drug use, adult language, and sexual content, The Apprentice runs exactly 2 hours in length and is available on all major video platforms, with an average price of $5.99 for a rental.