The Trap of Making a Trump Biopic
As the young Donald Trump in the new film The Apprentice, Sebastian Stan slouches while he walks, pouts while he talks, and delivers every line of dialogue in a near monotone. Such behaviors tend to form the foundation for any recent Trump performance, but Stan delivers more than a comic impression. He finds complexity in these hallmarks: an instinctual defensiveness in those hunched shoulders, a frustrated petulance in the scowls. It’s precise work, in other words.
If only the film around him were just as carefully calibrated. attempts to chart Trump’s rise from real-estate businessman to future presidential candidate by focusing on his early career in the 1970s and ’80s,’s Jeremy Strong), he learned how to project power and not just crave it. The film is a muddy exercise in Trumpology that never answers the biggest question it raises: What does chronicling Trump’s beginnings illuminate about one of the most documented and least mysterious men in recent American history?
