Donald Trump doesn’t want Americans to see The Apprentice, and with good reason—it’s a bona fide supervillain origin story. Director Ali Abbasi’s much-buzzed-about film—premiering in theaters Oct. 11, following a special sneak peek at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival—can at times be frustratingly clunky and on the nose.

Even so, it’s an incisive primer on the relationship with Roy Cohn that made the 45th President of the United States who he is today. Which is to say, it lays out the gory details regarding the source of his egomania, greed, ambition, vanity, sociopathy, and heartless rapey-ness, the last of which comes to the fore in a brutal assault of his first wife Ivana.

The film to make the MAGA universe explode with rage, The Apprentice is a capitalist riff on Pygmalion by way of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with Cohen (Succession’s Jeremy Strong) the malevolent doctor and Trump (Sebastian Stan) his monster, complete (at tale’s end) with a shot of the latter’s head being crudely stapled together in order to erase his growing bald spot.

Abbasi’s tale introduces us to Trump in the late ’70s as a neophyte real estate developer operating under the enormous shadow of his mean titan father Fred (Martin Donovan). Despite his relatively slight stature, however, he’s become the youngest person to ever receive an invite to join the members-only NYC hot spot Le Club. There, he locks eyes with Cohn, whose glare is so blatantly Satanic that it’s pointless for Gabriel Sherman’s script to later have........

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