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The Apprentice review: Sebastian Stan is 'excellent' as a young Donald Trump

Nicholas Barber
Cannes Film Festival Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong in The Apprentice (Credit: Cannes Film Festival)Cannes Film Festival
The Apprentice documents the relationship between Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn (Credit: Cannes Film Festival)

With Sebastian Stan as the young Donald Trump and Jeremy Strong as his notoriously vicious lawyer mentor Roy Cohn, The Apprentice is part "compellingly cynical buddy movie", part conventional biopic.

Taking its name from a certain television series, The Apprentice is a shrewd and darkly amusing tragicomedy that dramatises Donald Trump's rise to fame and fortune in the 1970s and 80s. What that means is that some viewers will condemn it for being too harsh and others will condemn it for not being harsh enough. But the filmmakers' cunning efforts to show their subject as a human being rather than a superhero or a supervillain are what make it so watchable. While the movie begins with a disclaimer that many of its events are fictionalised, the former president has threatened to take legal action.

Donald (Sebastian Stan) is first seen as a young man in the early 1970s. He works for the New York real estate company run by his cold and condescending father Fred (Martin Donovan), knocking on doors and collecting rent from his impoverished tenants, but he dreams of opening a luxury high-rise hotel near Central Station. The only snag is that the company is being sued over the small matter of its racial profiling of potential renters. "How can I be racist when I've got a black driver">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });