No monster shambles into being fully formed. They’re made, sometimes lovingly tended to, by our own worst impulses. Shrewdly, “The Apprentice,” a hypnotically trashy biopic detailing Donald Trump’s rise to prominence in the ratty, Koch-era New York of the 1970s and ’80s, requires no sympathy for the future president.
That’s a good thing, because this Trump — already a schlump with rage issues played by Sebastian Stan with jowly prosthetics — is, if not quite the worst of all Trumps, still a pretty awful one. He’s the heartless rent collector who goes door to door in his father’s Brooklyn slum buildings, dodging pots of boiling water flung by tenants. He’s the Trump who elbows his way in line to scarf down cheese balls at an Atlantic City casino buffet.
He’s just getting started. By some fitting cosmic logic, though, in order to summon this creature into being, the movie’s director, Ali Abbasi, had to find someone even more horrible to love. He has him in Roy Cohn, the noxious Republican lawyer who watered the seeds of Trump’s ambition when the young developer needed affection (and a little political grease).
Jeremy Strong, who, as Kendall Roy on “Succession,” turned ethics-free tooldom into poetry, finds his Cohn in verbal tics and locked-jaw fixity. Amazingly, it’s the definitive one, even after the many takes on Cohn in “Angels in America,” “Fellow Travelers” and elsewhere. Shuddering with degraded VHS noise, “The Apprentice” ha.