Louise Talbot
Sep 29, 2024, updated Sep 30, 2024
For months, it looked like the Donald Trump origin story,
The Apprentice, was never going to find a distributor after the Cannes Film Festival,
as the Trump team threatened legal action to shut it down before it saw the light of day in the US.
It now has a national release date of October 10, and whether you dislike the former US president, or want to see him re-elected on November 5 for a second term in the White House, the two-hour feature film delivers some insights into a young Trump and his rise to power.
Described as a dive into the underbelly of the American empire, the film follows Trump, played by Sebastian Stan, and his deals with the influential right-wing lawyer and political fixer, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).
Martin Donovan plays his father, real estate developer Fred Trump, and Maria Bakalova plays his then wife, Ivana.
Positive reviews
“Stan eases into the role, suggesting the young Trump without venturing into an
SNL-like impersonation,” writes
Deadline‘s Pete Hammond in an early review after film festival screenings at Cannes and Telluride.
“He captures him precisely and believably throughout.”
However, the film may not tell you much about Trump that we don’t already know having been exposed to a decade of his domination of US politics.
“By this point, Trump and every political pundit with air time has made it abundantly clear who he is and how he got that way,” writes
Entertainment Weekly’s reviewer Maureen Lee Lenker.
She says the film “chronicles the rise of Donald Trump as a real estate mogul and his descent into greed, egomania, and moral bankruptcy throughout the 1970s and ’80s”.