How controversial is The Apprentice?
Ali Abbasi’s new film, The Apprentice, may be named after the TV show that fatefully beamed Donald Trump into millions of homes for fourteen seasons before its star’s even more fateful run for the US presidency. But after watching Abbasi’s twisted and wildly entertaining bildungsroman, featuring Sebastian Stan as a young Donald and Jeremy Strong as his dark-arts mentor Roy Cohn, you recognize an echo of the sorcerer’s apprentice too. Abbasi starts the film with footage of Richard Nixon telling the world he is not a crook, before segueing to a punk-soundtracked montage of broke-down Seventies New York.
