Movie Review: How did Trump become Trump? ‘The Apprentice’ has a theory

Decades before he hosted “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump was … an apprentice.

His mentor: Roy Cohn, the ruthless attorney who was a prominent New York power broker in the ’70s and ’80s after famously serving as a top aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

The Trump-Cohn connection is well known. But in “The Apprentice," his provocative if not quite shocking, entertaining if not quite illuminating, impeccably acted and inherently controversial film, Ali Abbasi takes it farther.

It’s this relationship, posits the Danish Iranian director, that essentially made a young real estate heir — inexperienced but wildly ambitious — into the man who would become the 45th U.S. president, smashing the norms of American politics along the way.

Speaking of unlikely paths: The mere route of “The Apprentice” to the big screen is fodder for its own movie.

Written by Gabriel Sherman and starring an ingeniously cast trio of Sebastian Stan as Trump, Jeremy Strong as Cohn and Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, the film failed to get picked up at Cannes in May. That was surely due at least in part to a cease and desist letter from Trump lawyers.

Trump’s campaign spokesman called the movie “pure fiction” (the filmmakers call their script “fact-based”). One of the film's investors — Trump supporter Dan Snyder, former owner of the Washington Commanders — saw it and wanted out. It was only weeks ago that Briarcliff Entertainment announced it would open “The Apprentice” this Friday — less than four weeks before the U.S. election.

So, what kind of movie do we have here?

Contrary to some descriptions, Abbasi says his film isn’t a biopic at all, but a look at a relationship — and at a system that’s about winning at...