A contemporary film reviewer’s most brutal challenge: taking on an origin-story biopic about him — He Who Shall Not Be Named — four weeks before Election Day 2024 and attempting to retain some semblance of objectivity (what?) or critical responsibility (oof) or at least rhetorical savoir-faire in the process. Let’s not kid ourselves: It’s an invitation to throw hands. Trying, this month, to look at Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice as a movie instead of a sign of something very wrong with the universe is a fool’s effort — not at all unlike the last nine years of punditry trying to grok whatever fuels the current GOP candidate’s persistent popularity. Some movies must be shunned not for what they are but for the reality they endeavor to reflect. In the end of course it’s just a movie, and so, right now, something of a footnote — the news cycle will, sorry, trump it. In November, either the forces of workaday reason and base-level bullshit detection will have triumphed, or the orcs will have taken the castle, again. Either way, Abbasi’s little film is a soon-to-be-forgotten pixel in the larger scenario. Maybe in a few years, when the stakes are lower and the bruises have faded, you might take a look and say, Huh, not bad. But not now. But OK, let’s do the job, as if it matters. It’s the ’70s, and fresh-faced Daddy’s boy Donald (Sebastian Shaw) is an up-and-coming NYC real estate mogul blessed with the nasty good fortune of crossing paths with Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who was a famously amoral, comic-book-villain mega-lawyer who graduated from being Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare junkyard dog to becoming a mover and shaker in city politics, even as he lived a wildly profligate gay-orgy lifestyle. From Cohn, Donald learns criminal stuff like blackmail and secret surveillance, and hears all kinds of rules: Never accept defeat, “Truth is malleable,” and so on. In other words, the same evil crap we’ve been hearing since 2015, three decades after Cohn died.  Cohn’s legacy lives on, and may ruin things yet. But in the film, we get to see Little Donald Fauntleroy make his first deals, back in the day, getting a taste of municipal skullduggery and learning how to be a mini-Cohn, which he does successfully enough to eventually turn around and be a douche to Cohn in the ’80s, when the poor little ogre was dying of AIDS. If this sounds like something you’d only sit through this month if your eyelids were clamped open, à la A Clockwork Orange, then you’re in good company. But since I did, I should say that the film’s strenuous effort at being “fair and balanced” is nonsense: Our protagonist is practically a Dickens foundling, a wide-eyed, egoless blank slate, vulnerable to Cohn’s witchy ways. It’s hard to imagine being an adult over the past nine years and coming away wanting to portray the guy, in his late 20s, early 30s, as some kind of guileless, arrested-development teenager ready to be instructed in the black arts of being a professional scumbag — as though it was all Cohn’s fault. If you’d been reading Wayne Barrett’s reporting on the man in the Voice at the time, you’d be smelling four-day-old fish, but even a minute’s worth of exposure anytime during 2024 would call the movie’s cards for you.  What were they thinking? The screenplay, by journalist and Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman, also pounds home the idea that Cohn was the way he was because of an ardent, take-no-prisoners patriotism — “You have to be willing to do anything to safeguard America!” he says, showing Our Hero his basement library of extortion-ready recordings. What this has to do with strong-arming the city council to build hotels is left unexplained, and anyway, it all sounds way too much like a neo-fascist stump speech today. It doesn’t help things that Strong’s snake-like Cohn is a powerfully convincing monstrosity and you can imagine a nitwitted viewer taking his warped reasoning as read. Only a foreign filmmaker — Abbasi is Persian-Dutch — could have swallowed that whopper and thought either man was a misguided, flag-waving ideologue and not the world-class miscreants they were and are. Oh yeah, there’s the whole “subplot” about Ivana (Maria Bakalova). It should also be said that Abbasi, whose rather terrific earlier movies include Border (2018) and Holy Spider (2022), brings a nice period grit to what is, ultimately, a banal and formulaic biopic trifle, complete with unremarkable historical cameos (Warhol, Steinbrenner, Roger Stone, etc.). Whatever this thing is to be taken for, it’s not Abbasi’s fault — though you can’t help but suspect it’ll be a circumstantial sinkhole from which his career will have to climb.  We could’ve warned him. Reportedly, the ex-prez in question tried to get the film scotched after its festival premieres — not surprising, given the arterial spray of dumb invective we routinely endure from him. But go ahead and try to pin down exactly what pissed him off (if it wasn’t the late-coming stomach-staple and scalp-reduction surgeries, in loving close-up). All told, the film’s a rather soft headshot of the worst American alive. The small distributor, Briarcliff, has clarified their position by subtitling Abbasi’s movie, on the poster, “An American Horror Story.” Settle down. That’s not the film, but it could be what we get for real.  ❖ Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. The post Review: ‘The Apprentice’ Blames Trumpism on a Dead Lawyer appeared first on LA Weekly.