“The Apprentice, a film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, explores Donald Trump’s sleazy relationship with his mentor, amoral lawyer Roy Cohn. It stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald J. Trump and is scheduled to hit theaters on October 11, ahead of the presidential election.
Since premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May, “The Apprentice,” a biopic about the rise of a young Donald J. Trump, has been searching for a distributor in the US.
The distributor is Briarcliff Entertainment, a distributor founded by Tom Ortenberg, a producer on “Spotlight” and “W.”
“The Apprentice” features Sebastian Stan (“Avengers: Endgame”) as Trump, and the “Succession” star Jeremy Strong as his former mentor Roy Cohn.
Apprentice depicts Trump’s growing friendship in the 1970s and 1980s with Cohn, a corrupt attorney and the political player who takes the aspiring real estate mogul under his wing. Cohn died of AIDS In 1986.
“The Apprentice,” directed by the Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi and written by the journalist Gabriel Sherman, received mostly positive reviews at Cannes.
Fighting to get into theaters
However, challenges began almost immediately when the former president threatened to sue, with a spokesman for his campaign slamming the movie as “malicious defamation.”
The filmmakers shot back and said The Apprentice was “a fair and balanced portrait” of the former president, who is scrambling to return to the White House in the November 5 presidential election.
Dan Snyder, the pro-Trump billionaire whose Kinematics company invested in the film, was angered by the tone of the film and reportedly tried to block its release.
“What Abassi’s film reveals most of all is the extent to which the toxicity that’s now an inescapable part of our contemporary reality was shaped by the unholy alliance between two men half a century ago,” THR’s David Rooney opined in his Cannes review of the film, which received largely positive critical reception across the board and now stands at 77 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
In one scene in the film, Trump is seen raping Ivana, his first wife, played by Maria Bakalova. Ivana Trump initially referred to the 1989 incident as rape and spoke about it during the couple’s divorce a year later. Several years later, she said she did not want her words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense. She died in 2022 and was buried in a Trump golf course.
Finally, we’ll get to see the sleazy origins of Trump and his self-destructive lies, insults and denials that define his tactics.
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