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’.