You couldn’t really do better than The Apprentice in terms of risk-taking in 2024. But Ali Abbasi manages to navigate between the main traps that could have been set for him, while imbuing his film with a very refreshing style.

There’s no denying that Ali Abbasi has taken a bold step with the release of The Apprentice, just one month ahead of an American presidential election in which the man at the very center of his film is one of the two main candidates. It’s hardly surprising that, despite its eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes last May and the rave reviews it received, Abbasi has had difficulty finding an American distributor. Who would want to take on the task of distributing in theaters a time bomb that will inevitably provoke public reaction in a climate of such election tensions? Coppola and Todd Phillips could almost be jealous of the noise this film will undoubtedly generate.

The Apprentice takes us back to the early ’70s, to a time when young Trump (Sebastian Stan) is still trying to find his place among the cutthroats of the investment world. He knows what he wants, but he’s pretty uptight (in both senses of the word). His life takes a decisive turn when he meets Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) – a mesmerizing lawyer with a piercing gaze who’s as despicable as he is effective at getting what he wants – and Ivana (Maria Bakalova). Abbasi places the entire weight of his film on the shoulders of these two actors, and like two forces complementing each other, the two men pull it off with remarkable prowess. Although giving Sebastian Stan the role of the young Trump is far too flattering for the businessman and former President, Stan finds in his eyes, mouth and body gestures the arrogant, disingenuous personality we’ve come to expect from his performance.

Abbasi knows he’s playing both sides of the fence with this film, telling the success story of a real estate businessman in the 70s and 80s, as well as showing us the disloyalty, artifice and hypocrisy he displays later on. But the filmmaker pulls it off prodigiously by placing his narrative somewhere between fiction and documentary. The camera seems to act as a voyeur, a third person in the room watching and listening to the characters. From the outset, Abbasi constructs his narrative as a series of decisions made by Trump, and then shows the consequences in and around his life. In the end, this gives a rather personal and apolitical overview of the story, which was no mean feat. And it even manages to make us feel empathy for a Cohn, betrayed by Trump, even though we know full well that the guy is a scumbag, and that’s no mean feat either.

Focusing on two decades, the filmmaker gradually evolves the visual aspect of his film, replacing the thick, visible 70s grain that characterizes the beginning of the film with a treatment akin to a VHS videotape in the 80s. This fits in perfectly with Trump’s lifestyle, gradually rising from managing a real estate business in New York‘s working-class neighborhoods to a smooth, clean sphere of luxury as his career progresses.

Undoubtedly, The Apprentice isn’t revolutionary in its depiction, and we leave the theater with the same thoughts about Trump that we had when we walked in. But Ali Abbasi executes this film with a real mastery of his material, backed up by excellent performances from his entire cast. Of course, he couldn’t help but make several references to Trump’s future political career, references we could have done without as they are so heavily brought in, but also because we know far more – and too much – than the film on that subject.

After several years attached to Marvel films, Sebastian Stan seems to be breaking out of his comfort zone with dramatic roles and risk-taking. Well, you couldn’t really do better than The Apprentice in terms of risk-taking. But Ali Abbasi manages to navigate between the main traps that could be set for him, while infusing his film with a very refreshing style.

The Apprentice – Official Trailer