The Apprentice Movie

About the relationship between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump

Today I saw the controversial movie about Donald Trump that received a warm reception at the Cannes Film Festival and it was also one that Trump unsuccessfully attempted to prevent from being released prior to the election. Here are my thoughts about it.

The Apprentice was named after the reality TV show that Donald Trump hosted just prior to entering politics where each season a group of ambitious business-oriented people competed for the chance to serve as Donald Trump’s personal apprentice for one year where this person learned the ropes of what it takes to be a success in the business world directly from Trump himself. In this movie it’s Donald Trump himself who is the apprentice because it focuses on the early years of Trump’s career as a real estate developer working for the company that his grandfather founded. The film focuses on Trump’s relationship with the notoriously ruthless lawyer Roy Cohn, whose help Trump initially sought after the Nixon Administration’s Justice Department had sued Trump’s company for discrimination against African Americans in not allowing them to rent Trump properties.

The film begins with Trump meeting Cohn, who promptly takes the young Trump under his wing and he educates Trump on the three main rules on how to always win—1. Always attack, 2. Never admit wrongdoing, and 3. Always claim victory even if defeated. He also shows Trump some unethical and illegal means of winning, such as the scene where Cohn admits that he secretly tapes people in order to use for blackmail later.

Cohn used all kinds of unethical sleazy ways to fight off that Justice Department lawsuit and Trump ultimately won. In appreciation Trump kept Cohn as his lawyer for many years. Trump starts out as being unsure but as the film goes on he gradually becomes more and more ruthless as he takes Cohn’s lessons to heart until he had a falling out with Cohn when Trump began to ignore Cohn’s advice against building the first of his three casinos in Atlantic City. The film ends soon after Roy Cohn’s death from AIDS in 1986 when Trump hires a writer named Tony Schwartz to help with writing what would become Trump’s first book that would propel Donald Trump to national and international fame as a celebrity businessman—The Art of the Deal. Trump tells Schwartz the same three main rules on how to always win that Roy Cohn had taught him at the beginning of the movie.

The film also devotes time to his initial pursuit of a young Czechoslovakian-born model named Ivana Zelníčková, who would later become Trump’s first wife. It shows the gradual breakdown of his first marriage, which also includes a brutal scene where he rapes Ivana.

There is also a subplot about Trump’s oldest brother, Fred Jr., which begins when Fred Jr. is belittled by his father for choosing to become an airline pilot. Fred Jr. is also an alcoholic who ended up dying midway through the movie. If you’ve read Mary Trump’s book about her Uncle Donald and his family, Too Much and Never Enough, you’d know that the film is accurate in portraying Fred Jr.’s brief tragic life.

If you’ve read Mary Trump’s book or even read the social media posts of Noel Casler (who once worked as a staffer on Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice reality show) you probably won’t be surprised by the movie’s portrayal of Donald Trump. I found the movie incredibly well-acted. The best performance is Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn. He totally nailed it as Cohn, especially Cohn’s contradiction as someone who casually dropped homophobic slurs yet he was gay. I wouldn’t be surprised if Strong gets nominated for an Oscar next year because his performance was that good. Sebastian Stan is also good as Donald Trump where he went from being an unsure young man on what to do next to becoming the very ruthless person that we all know and loathe. But it was Strong’s performance that really stands out and it is the main reason why you should watch this movie if you get the chance.

Should you show this movie to someone who is thinking about voting for Trump in an effort to change that person’s mind? It depends on how devoted that person is to Donald Trump. If the person is a die-hard MAGA supporter, that person probably won’t be persuaded by that movie and will think that it’s a big slander against Trump. If the person is more undecided on who to vote for or that person is more weak in his/her support of Donald Trump, this movie might be the one to show such a person in order to persuade that person to vote for Kamala Harris.

I don’t know how successful The Apprentice will ultimately be at the box office. I went to the theater the day after it was released and I was one of only four people in the theater. To be fair, I had attended an early Saturday matinee screening because ticket prices were cheaper. The movie is also being released the same weekend as Piece By Piece (the biopic about Pharrell Williams where all the roles are acted by Lego Minifigs), My Hero Academia: You’re Next anime, and a documentary titled Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. All I can say is that if you get the chance to see The Apprentice, do it.

UPDATE (December 30, 2024): Over two months after I wrote my review, Donald Trump's niece, Mary Trump, made this video where she gave her own review of the movie. She found fault with the way that the movie portrayed her various family members. While I wrote in my initial review that I felt like the movie had accurately portrayed Donald Trump and members of his family, I had based my assessment on reading Mary Trump’s 2020 tell-all book Too Much and Never Enough and the social media posts of former Celebrity Apprentice production assistant Noel Casler (who also has his own Substack that's worth reading). But Mary Trump knows her family on a level that I don't since I had never personally met any member of that family so I'm going to defer to her assessment on the accuracy of that movie's portrayal of her family.

I also came upon this review of the film by David L. Marcus, who is the cousin of Roy Cohn. He felt that the film very accurately portrayed his cousin and he praised Jeremy Strong's performance in that movie.

In any case The Apprentice didn't do too well at the box office. It's now available on the various streaming services. Despite Mary Trump’s claims of how the movie inaccurately portrayed various members of her family, I still think that it's worth watching just to see Jeremy Strong's portrayal of the odious Roy Cohn. He was that good in the film.

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