The Apprentice on France 2: a surprising biopic on the rise of Trump (review)

Sebastian Stan plays Donald Trump in his younger years, with Jeremy Strong as his lawless mentor.

Presented in competition during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, The Apprentice is broadcast for the first time unencrypted this Tuesday evening on France 2, right for the American mid-term elections. It will also be available the next day in streaming on the France Télévisions website. Première recommends this biopic on the rise of the current President of the United States which earned an Oscar nomination for its two main actors.

How did Donald become Trump? Ali Abbasi (Border, Nights of Mashhad) examines the future American president in the 1970s, then an aspiring real estate entrepreneur but already armed with a ferocious appetite for winning, money and glitz. The idea of ​​this biopic not so conventional in form – the image treated in a worn VHS way, a gimmick a priori a bit clumsy, ultimately adds quite a bit to the subject – is to tell the origin of the male through his original flaw: a tyrannical father impossible to make proud. A very simple psychological mechanism, but one that Sebastian Stan sells admirably between a light imitation of Trump’s crooked mouth and real freedom of movement…