The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison welcomes THE APPRENTICE (Ali Abbas, 2024)

The Apprentice is in press book jargon "Highly anticipated." This of course has nothing to do with the quality of its filmcraft. It's not the first time that a movie about a head of state up for re-election worried people to the point of wanting it suppressed. Think Maurice Elvey's laudatory The Life of David Lloyd George upsetting the PM's own party to the extent of sending Ideal Films a truck with a couple of thousand-pound notes and gathering up the materials. So now that Ali Abbas' Donald Trump film is actually in the theatres, the response has been kind of sedate – no lawsuits, no riots, not even a deluge of think-piece editorials - so far at least. There was more of a fuss over Seth Rogan's Kim Jong-Un movie The Interview. Barack Obama had to be photographed going to a neighbourhood movie house to assure the U.S. public that was safe.

The Apprentice doesn't look like a cash in quick effort or a hatchet job. US political satire TV has just about exhausted the market for those. It takes a while to work out just what it is. Kicking off with Richard Nixon is a good clue. The film has qualities. Its picture of the look, sound and mood of seventies-onward America is imposing. "New York is the greatest city in the world.". Add Ed Koch to the walk-on impersonations - Rona Barrett, Andy Warhol, Mike Wallace, Rupert Murdoch. Trump Tower emerges as a world center of bad taste. The film loses impetus when the action shifts to Atlantic City. It all comes with the obligatory raunchy moments.

We pick up Marvel Super Hero Sebastian Stan doing Donald Trump, the twenty-something son of New York slum landlord Martin Donovan (superior make up jobs all round) confronting aggro tenants as he tries to collect rents. Straight away there's a whole lot to get our attention – Stan injecting glimpses of Trump mannerisms that we recognise, his daddy issues (we watch Donovan crush other son pilot Charlie Carrick), their company's problems with race discrimination court actions and Stan homing in on Borat's glamorously blonde Maria Bakalova, as Ivana in her low cut scarlet number. To deal with all of this, he enlists the support of Jeremy (Succession) Strong's Roy Cohn, a shadowy figure in the saga of Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy and rapidly Stan/The Donald. Cohn has already shown up as Al Pacino in the 2003 Mike Nichols series Angels in America.

This movie is really more interested in him than Trump and its argument is that what we hear from the MAGA lot was already shaped up under Cohn with previous (Republican) administrations. We get a mash-up of Svengali, Citizen Kane, Faust and Falstaff. He bankrolls, styles, molds and mentors Trump. The film's most extraordinary scene has Cohn/Strong at peak repugnant, explaining how he engineered "the burning" of young mother Ethel Rosenberg, out of patriotism, while simultaneously being his most convincing and charismatic. It's a challenge writer, director and actor devour with relish. The film becomes the account of the decline of Cohn and his unshakeable vision finding a home with Donald Trump. We end on the cross-cut funeral and cosmetic surgery – and an American nocturnal vista with Old Glory fluttering grimly at its edge.

It's tempting to see this one as Hollywood picking up the glove Trump is forever flinging down for them but no one involved has a big stake in the US film capital. It's an Irish, Canadian, Swedish, Norwegian effort. I can't see the film - or any other movie - effecting the up-coming election - or any other election. Most of the time I'm sorry to observe that.

Ali Abbas has already made the disturbing 2022 Iranian serial killer movie Holy Spider. His interest is in monsters. That's likely why his Donald Trump movie ends up more like The Girl in the Kremlin (Stalin shaves girls' heads) or The Hitler Gang, than Oliver Stone's Presidential biographies, let alone F.D.R. pieces like Sunrise at Campobello or Hyde Park on the Hudson. Then there's Tim Bottoms in the South Park lot's 2001 That's My Bush where neighbors drop into George and Laura's White House to discuss gardening. Yes, that one maybe.