THE APPRENTICE is a well-made movie that’s a good explanation of and well deserved middle finger to the historic moment we find ourselves in. It’s also a movie I was dreading watching and that I don’t even necessarily recommend because one could hardly blame you for not wanting to spend another second thinking about or watching even a simulation of that miserable fucking worthless prick asshole ratfucker Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan, RICKI AND THE FLASH).

It’s not exactly a biopic, more of a super villain origin story, or maybe a thesis, an argument that the very familiar modus operandi of our current nightmare came from Trump meeting and idolizing another one of history’s most wretched fuckfaces, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, SERENITY). If you’re not familiar with his works, he was Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel in the ‘50s, working with the notorious scumbag senator to tear apart America with politically motivated harassment prosecutions accusing people of communism. They also ran a witch hunt against closeted gay men, blackmailing them and hectoring many into suicide (though Cohn himself was a closeted gay man).

In the ‘70s Cohn was an attorney and fixer for some famous rich people and a number of gangsters including John Gotti, so Trump fit right in there. We might be living in a golden age right now if this one person had found a good therapist instead of a good fixer, but, as depicted in the movie, he was impressed that Cohn helped Nixon by leaking the medical records of Vice Presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton, showing that he had been treated for depression. Muppet Babies Trump can’t help but idolize a bully and cheater who does whatever he wants and fucks over anybody he sees with the cheapest shots imaginable. That’s what he wants to be when he grows up.

In the movie the two meet at a restaurant. Trump is telling his date about how hard it was to get reservations and who all the powerful people are around them, so she goes to the restroom and never returns. (Wise choice.) Cohn is holding court with his table of big shots and Trump comes over and talks to him. Cohn knows of his dad, the real estate mogul Fred Trump Sr. (Martin Donovan, THE OPPOSITE OF SEX), and how the Justice Department is suing them for refusing to rent their properties to Black people. Cohn of course is attracted to such an evil case (and maybe to Trump, I think it’s implying) so after some pestering he becomes the kid’s lawyer. There’s no win to case, they’re clearly guilty as hell, but he does blackmail the lead prosecutor into a settlement. Since he’s even more of an asshole than Trump Sr. but more approving of junior, he becomes his mentor.

Most crucially, Cohn teaches him his three rules: always attack, never admit wrongdoing, always claim victory. First of all, the kind of guy who would go around bragging about having three rules is obviously the kind of insufferable bozo to get the fuck away from (even if it’s The Transporter). Second of all, no one could deny that those rules are the evil philosophy Trump has lived and conquered with ever since. Kind of an open and shut case on the premise of this movie.

Many have noticed that Trump’s brain is stuck in the ‘80s, and it’s the ‘80s depicted in this movie, an AMERICAN PSYCHO wet dream, a world of business goons who probly don’t remember what they look like without a tie, trying to be accepted in clubs and bars, but only for the status. It’s evocatively soundtracked with English synth pop classics that capture the right feeling but if they were sentient would be perched on the edge of a cliff wondering what they ever did to deserve the association.

I suppose maybe it is exactly a biopic, because it sort of plays the greatest hits, showing how Cohn used blackmail and shit to help Trump achieve his dreams like turning a derelict hotel into a Hyatt and building Trump Tower to upstage his father, who thought those were stupid fucking ideas. Also Trump does things Cohn thinks are stupid fucking ideas, like building a casino he doesn’t know how to run and losing tons of money like a chump who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing and doesn’t listen to anybody.

Also Trump pesters a model named Ivana (Maria Bakalova, DIRTY ANGELS) into dating, then marrying him. She helps build his company because she’s better at talking to the media than him, so of course he turns on her. He makes her get breast implants, then belittles her for it. He gets more and more vain, addicted to weight loss pills and having a painful scalp surgery to hide his bald spot. When he torments her until she insults him back he attacks and rapes her. Not fun to see, but would seem like a whitewash without it. The people who act like absolute monsters in public are even worse in private.

Both Stan and Strong were nominated for acting Oscars, both deserved, I think. Strong is genuinely terrifying in it, a soul-less, malevolent presence, a pair of arrogant, hateful eyes overshadowing the equally putrid garbage spewing from his mouth. I admit, though, that I’ve never watched Succession, so I don’t know if this is a new register for him or not.

What I do know is that it’s a hell of a leap for Stan, who I apparently saw star in Renny Harlin’s THE COVENANT almost 20 years ago but like anyone I mostly know him from playing the Winter Soldier in the Marvel movies, where you’d be forgiven for assuming he was a medium-likable pretty boy with limited range. I guess playing Jeff Gillooly in I, TONYA began his string of notorious tabloid goon roles, followed by Pam & Tommy on TV. But playing Trump seems like a much bigger challenge. Unfortunately the real guy has maybe the most familiar mannerisms on earth, since his idiotic presence has been firehose vomited into our eyes and brains daily for so many years now. Stan has to capture those enough for us to accept him as the guy, but not so much that it seems like an SNL sketch. He has to make him human enough to be believable, but, since it’s this particular guy, not too human to be believable. Just barely human. Honestly I wouldn’t think any actor could make it work. Stan somehow does.

There are weird phrases, expressions and pronunciations that we recognize from the real guy, sometimes humorously so. But I think what Stan gets most right is making him never cool, never graceful (there are some funny parts where he runs), and always looking uncomfortable and out of place with other people, whether awkwardly walking in on a gay orgy or just being in a normal situation where he has to exchange words with somewhat regular people. He really got down that look that Trump has when he doesn’t understand what people are talking about or is unhappy to be somewhere but very half-assedly tries to fake that he’s present. He always looks like a little boy dressed up as an adult and not sure if people are buying it or not.

The movie does sort of humanize Trump in the sense that it shows him doing un-Trump-like things like driving a car once, and walking on a street a couple times, and even briefly doing actual work on a job (but the work is collecting rent as a slumlord). In one scene an angry tenant throws pee (?) on him and in that moment he is all of us. Not Trump, the pee-thrower.

There is a scene where his troubled alcoholic brother Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick, TRENCH 11) comes to him for help and he hugs him and tells him it will be okay. Hard to imagine! I guess he does have a heart in there somewhere. Then he refuses to let him stay there and fucks him over and he dies shortly after, but still. One hug. Seems huge for him. Possibly fictional.

After the funeral he’s upset, almost in tears, Ivana tries to comfort him and he snaps at her and tells her not to touch him. I suspect this is true. He believes human emotions other than petty baby angry tantrums are weakness. He can’t wrap his head around kindness or caring.

He’s much closer to Cohn than his brother but that relationship goes in the same direction. Trump gets everything from him, including the means to drive the whole world off a cliff (currently in progress), then when Cohn’s luck turns Trump’s not there to help. One of the most powerful moments (ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL MOMENTS SPOILER) happens at the end when Cohn is dying of AIDS and Trump feels sorry enough for him that he brings him to Mar-a-Lago for a small birthday party. He gives him a pair of Trump-branded diamond cufflinks and Cohn is very touched by the gesture until Ivana tells him they’re just cheap cubic zirconium. That’s the moment – Cohn experiencing the feeling of friendship before realizing that it’s not that, and that the huge asshole he helped mold into a gargantuan asshole now just sees him as another value-less nobody to enjoy taking a dump on. It happens to all of them.

If you read about Roy Cohn you can see that yep, it’s the same belligerent fucking asshole tactics we see from all the MAGA reps and White House spokespricks and such. For example, when Cohn settled the discrimination lawsuit out of court Trump then violated the terms of the settlement and got sued again and Cohn said it was “nothing more than a rehash of complaints by a couple of planted malcontents.” Another Trump-like thing is that when there was a dispute over the Lionel model train company, founded by Cohn’s great uncle, he put together a group of investors to buy out the company, then ran it into the ground in only 3 1/2 years until he was forced to resign. Absent their super powers of lawlessness, shamelessness and odious cruelty, these people mostly aren’t very good at things.

Near the beginning we see Nixon on TV. It’s such a distressing image because we’ve grown up in a world where these same clips always meant “you kids would not believe the turmoil we had in the ‘60s,” but now they mean “jesus we were so naive back then.” This is literally a guy who saw “did dirty tricks for Nixon” as a great thing to have on a resume, so of course he’s made that crook president look like Mr. Rogers by comparison.

The script for THE APPRENTICE is by Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair correspondent and The Loudest Voice in the Room author who covered the 2016 campaign and heard stories about this stuff from people who worked for Trump. Supposedly Clint Eastwood and Paul Thomas Anderson turned the directing gig down before it went to Ali Abbasi (BORDER, HOLY SPIDER).

One thing that’s funny about the movie is that one of the production companies, Kinematics, is financed by businessman Dan Snyder (“widely considered to be one of the worst owners in the history of North American professional sports” according to Wikipedia, with four different citations), who invested thinking it was going to be about how awesome Trump is. When he saw a screening he flipped his wig and got the movie shelved for a while, before selling his stake in it.

Of course it’s an anti-Trump movie and of course making an anti-Trump movie is not gonna save the world. But I don’t think anybody thought they were trying to get the word out. I’m sure even Snyder knows the president is that asshole in the movie. It would be laughable to try to dispute much of this. If it’s warning us about anything, it’s how these same sick values keep mutating and living on, this one guy Roy Cohn empowering McCarthyism, Nixon’s dirty tricks, the mafia, and this particular racist tax scamming New York City real estate tycoon. And the movie doesn’t have to tell us that it didn’t stop there. Can it ever be stopped?