Review: ‘The Apprentice’ features Sebastian Stan as a young Trump on the rise, accompanied by Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn

Is it just my imagination, or is “The Apprentice” a pretty interesting movie?

Less than a month before the US presidential election, you’d expect an eleventh-hour Trump biopic (which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year) to settle for cheap smears and a lot of propaganda. Such things are hardly limited to the left or the right. After all, it’s that time of year for a Dinesh D’Souza tribute to the man who pardoned him.

“The Apprentice” works a little differently. It’s a real, contradictory and sporadically insightful film, dramatizing what Trump has created Trump at a particularly impressionable period in his rise.

Screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the Roger Ailes Fox News bestseller “The Loudest Voice in the Room” and worked on the subsequent Showtime series, narrows “The Apprentice” to about 13 years, from 1973 to 1986. We meet Trump at the end twenty. , collecting rent from aging or unwanted tenants in one of the buildings owned by his ruthless developer father.

A better future for the aspiring real estate mogul is just around the corner. At Le Club restaurant and nightclub in Manhattan (he is the youngest member ever), Trump catches the attention of infamous lawyer, political fixer and media addict Roy Cohn on an enchanted evening on a busy floor. He’s there with his friend, who isn’t recognized as his friend because Cohn has learned to thrive in a deeply homophobic time, years before AIDS. His mantra in all parts of his life: deny, deny, deny. “The Apprentice” is about Trump’s adoption of that mantra.

Early in the film, Fred Trump seems destined for defeat by the U.S. Department of Justice over a racial discrimination housing case, supported by evidence about his redistricting of black tenants. Ridiculous, Cohn mutters to the young Trump, the one with the artfully wavy hair. Your dad doesn’t rent to black people? No problem: “It’s your building. You can do whatever you want.’

Cohn steps in, and poof, no more legal trouble for the Trump family. Donald embarks on his dream project: a luxury hotel on non-luxury 42nd Street. This was in the years of New York City’s mean streets. The future president is building his flashy reputation on can-do, out-of-my-way optimism, or the appearance thereof, built on mountains of debt, stiff employees, bankruptcies and takeovers, always.

“The Apprentice” moves quickly, with some clever production and costume designers doing a clever job of recreating the period in precise gauche style. (A Canadian/Irish/Danish co-production cost a relatively modest $16 million.) The film sticks close to the Trump/Cohn story within a larger, pencil-sketched framework of how Trump’s stern, disapproving father brought his brash, brash, Callow son around to find a more encouraging, if ethically and legally bankrupt, mentor in Cohn.

Meanwhile, Trump’s older brother struggles with alcoholism, which ultimately took his life through a heart attack. There’s a scene in director Ali Abbasi’s film in which Donald, now married to Ivana Trump, suppresses so much anguished shame over crying over his brother’s death in front of Ivana that their already faltering marriage takes place within seconds, for our eyes, explodes. This comes after we see Trump at his sink, scrubbing his hands, hard, then harder, faster. If the movie had been all hit-and-run jabs, screenwriter Sherman would have had someone make a joke about germophobia. Instead, we see signs of it, without comment, in a private breakdown without catharsis or snark.

Disappointingly, ‘The Apprentice’ too often settles for broader, less illuminating touches, along with, yes, some snark. The artists save the film from itself. As Trump, Sebastian Stan captures just enough of the familiar physical cues—the pursing of the lips, the frequent checking in with the nearest reflective surface to see how his hair is doing—without trying to impersonate. Coming from a related fictional weasel in “Succession,” Jeremy Strong doesn’t easily suggest the look or sound of the real Roy Cohn. But he draws you in anyway; his malice has humor.

As Ivana, Borat 2 standout Maria Bakalova is great, subtly portraying what the film version of Ivana may or may not have seen in her marriage to this climber from the suburbs. The film’s most controversial scene depicts Trump’s rape of his wife on the brink of their divorce. It is based on testimonies, later recanted by Ivana; Trump himself has threatened legal action over this series, which has been revised since its premiere in Cannes. Its inclusion in any form was threatening enough for the film’s main financier to abandon the project.

The surprise is that it doesn’t come across as pure exploitation. Director Abbasi, who is Danish-Iranian,’s previous films include “Border” and “Holy Spider,” as well as the final two episodes of “The Last of Us,” and he is skilled enough to handle terrible behavior non-sensationalized. Elsewhere, Abbasi and screenwriter Sherman are sincere, if unevenly successful, in seeking what might be impossible to find, at least in a two-hour movie: an answer to what makes this person tick.

“The Apprentice” does better with simpler questions about what Trump learned from Cohn, and how Cohn’s instructions led to his success and ultimately the most serious controversy in modern American politics. Heavy business, okay. When the film works, and it does more often than I expected, it’s because the performers—including an excellent Martin Donovan as Fred Trump—lighten that burden as they search for small, revealing, and useful truths of their own.

Maria Bakalova (left) as Ivana Trump and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump "The student.