The Apprentice begins with footage of Richard Nixon addressing a television audience. It is 1973 and the Senate Watergate hearings are underway. ‘People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook … Well, I’m not a crook,’ Nixon intones.

This new Donald Trump biopic, anchored to the real world through such archival footage, is being released at a similarly consequential political moment, twenty-five days ahead of election day.

The Apprentice struggled to find a distributor following its première at Cannes in May, when Trump’s lawyers issued a cease-and-desist letter, terming it a ‘concoction of lies’ from screenwriter and Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman. Director Ali Abbasi has countered in interviews that The Apprentice is ‘fact-based’, but a disclaimer preceding the film stamps it ‘fiction’.

In his recent Quarterly Essay, High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink, Don Watson argues that American life takes place in the ‘intersecting worlds’ of the screen and its fictions. That Trump is a liar and crook merely places him somewhere between a cowboy and mobster – American heroes because of, not despite, their flaws.

What The Apprentice asks is whether an effective critique of Trump can also be deployed through the screen, its sounds, dialogue, metaphors, those blue-grey vistas from a New York skyscraper, when Trump surveys capitalism from a velvet couch, negotiates a pre-nuptial settlement with Ivana, holds up an infant Donald Jr, or expounds this essential truth: talent is natural: ‘you are born with it, it’s genetics, you have to have it.’

But it’s not genetics, maintains The Apprentice: Donald Trump was made, and this tale of his relationship with Roy Cohn, who rose to prominence as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, wants to show how. Trump did not start out grotesque; power, money, diet pills, scalp transplants, and Cohn made him so.

The Apprentice is a lush depiction of 1970s and 1980s New York, its stiletto-clad discogoers and yellow cabs reminding us of a million other screen moments. Tammany Hall corruption, notorious city planner Robert Moses, and mobsters are all there, just out of frame. The New York streetscape acts as a kind of chorus, a reminder of the street level, the immutable link between the powerful and the powerless invoked in the lyrics of New Order’s song ‘Blue Monday’: ‘How does it feel/ to treat me like you do?’

The Apprentice, a television show that began in 2004 and from which this film confusingly takes its name, was said to be the making of Trump, prefiguring on screen his transformation from conman to authority figure. In what was one of the original reality television shows, each episode concluded with Trump judging competitors on their business acumen, thereby suggesting his own, and shouting: ‘You’re fired!’

When non-disclosure agreements expired earlier this year, producer Bill Pruitt said that Trump ‘was not, by any stretch, a successful New York real estate tycoon like we made him out to be’. Adding ballast to this was the recent publication of Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump squandered his father’s fortune and created the illusion of success by Pulitzer prize-winning reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig.

Does The Apprentice risk perpetuating the myth of Trump’s corporate success? The building of Trump Tower is depicted as a feat of political and hard-nosed drive, with intimidation of council officials, union payoffs, and a glitzy launch party, all pink marble and hairspray. When Fred Trump (Donald’s father) demurs that the foyer waterfall must have cost a lot, the audience is meant to roll their eyes with Donald, for that was the point.

Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump (courtesy of Madman Entertainment)

Sebastian Stan’s Trump is a curious thing, a Remus to the Romulus we find in our newsfeeds; more sincere, articulate, and handsome, even as facial rashes and a burger paunch attend his rise in wealth and power. He is the same man or his better twin, Stan insists, through an uncanny embodiment of Trump’s signature physicality: nose in the air, the slicking back of hair, the petulant pout.

Maria Bakalova’s big-haired and sequined Ivana Trump is all thespian control; every shot conveys her shift from deal master (Donald is forced to concede a fivefold increase in her allowance to secure the marriage) to loser, in Trumpian terms: a woman whose ‘plastic tits’ he now disdains, who makes him ‘feel nothing’, the object of his sexual violence in a scene that will be talked about more than any other. That this scene follows Ivana’s attempt to reconnect them sexually with a book about the G-spot (1980s icon, tick) risks a kind of narrative pout; a too-efficient evocation of Trump’s hostility towards women as autonomous beings. And yet, conjuring a person without resorting to caricature, one who is, by all accounts, all caricature, is a challenge.

Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn shows how it can be done. Cohn is the real protagonist of this piece, whatever the film’s packaging says. He is the Victor Frankenstein, Donald the monster who arrives in the world programmed with Cohn’s three rules, heavy now with 2024 significance: 1) attack, attack, attack, 2) admit nothing, and 3) ‘the most important’, always claim victory.

The tragedy for Cohn is how Trump deploys his own edicts in Cohn’s darkest hour. As in real life, Cohn never admits to being gay, nor that his partner dies from AIDS, nor that finally – agonisingly – his own condition is not liver cancer, as brilliantly conveyed by Al Pacino as Cohn in Mike Nichols’s Angels in America (2003). Whereas the real Cohn died only five weeks after being disbarred for unethical conduct, The Apprentice leans into Cohn’s pitiful transformation, a skeletal Strong fondling the Trump-stamped, diamond-encrusted cuff links from Donald that Ivana informs him are fake.

In an early scene, we find Cohn giving legal advice to Trump while doing push-ups in his underpants, his lover’s sideways glance further evidence of a subtext announced in a club scene when Cohn insists the teetotaller Donald smash vodkas and says, ‘I bet you fuck a lot,’ the rising intonation signalling a question, a proposition, a vulnerability in the face of youthful, WASPish wealth and its attendant homophobia. His boudoir studded with frog ceramics (a real-life detail), the sweating Cohn counsels Trump: ‘Everyone wants to suck a winner’s cock.’ And so it transpires.

The Apprentice is a film that addresses this social Darwinism. It prosecutes the case for capitalism’s moral corruption and ultimately its failure by showing that even its proponents become its victims.

The film’s claim to fiction – as bold as any Trump lie – is therefore arguable and admirable: Trump and Cohn are not the real subjects here; their narrative provides a mythic arch, a plot convenience for the real one: society. On the page and on our screens, biography has been transformed, and we are allowed to use lives to tell a bigger story, dispensing with our subjects when they are no longer useful as callously as Trump here dispenses with women, mid-fellatio.

But the film and its promotion are also deeply invested in the current world, claims to truth within this world and, frankly, the outcome of this November election. When The Apprentice seems to be pushing it all too far – the twisted ceramic lampstands and velvet drapes framing the Jewish Cohn, corruptor of WASPish America – you have to pinch yourself and remember that it is largely true, that life is weirder, more burlesque, than Nixon’s television audience – us – seems able to grasp.

The Apprentice (Madman Entertainment) opens nationally 10 October 2024.