If Vanity-Fair-journalist-turned-screenwriter Gabriel Sherman is to be believed, Donald Trump’s motivating operations can be boiled down to three simple tenets, bequeathed to him at an impressionable age by unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn. Anyone looking to explain the sitting American President’s rise from real estate mogul to the leader of the free world is bound to lean on oversimplification, but even in a field littered with reductive theses, his stands out for its cleanliness. To fully understand the creature at the center of a monster movie, as Sherman and director Ali Abbasi have described The Apprentice, some tidying was surely in order, but the way in which their latest feature adheres to the aforementioned guiding principles is worthy of note. They say it’s almost impossible not to empathize with a protagonist, a product of time spent and vantage point. Perhaps the same is true when you’re making his biopic.

The first rule is the easiest to understand, and thereby the one The Apprentice lives by most diligently: Attack, attack, attack. Set amidst the ruins of 1973 New York City, a young Trump (Sebastian Stan) happens upon Cohn (Jeremy Strong) in a high class social club whose dim lighting portends a deal with the devil. While the Trump family’s courtroom-bound troubles would seemingly be enough to spur the meeting, the limelight and strength embodied by the embattled legal practitioner prove just as alluring. A little tutelage here, a little backroom massaging there, and we’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the braggadocious affectations that have come to define our current White House tenant. If your alarm bells are going off over such an undynamic representation of Trump’s rise to power, you’re watching the wrong movie. Abbasi and Sherman are assailants, not historians, and their actors are ready for some frontline action.

There’s no overstating the difficulty of portraying Trump in the year of our lord 2024, the metatextual thickets of SNL impersonations and TikTok sendups unavoidably floating around the margins. Given this tortured context, Stan’s work is admirable and occasionally enveloping, his gestures and manner of speaking slowly evolving throughout the film’s runtime, affixing basic human attributes to a man who has long since become a caricature. The way he purses his lips is enough to haunt your dreams, and while the same is true of Strong’s deadened gaze, the latter gets there through sheer muscle. Hollywood’s preeminent try-hard is certainly leaving it all out there, but his demonic turn is defined more by effort and credibility. You can’t take your eyes off of him, metaphorical sweat gushing out of the actor’s every pore, blurring the line between performance and performer. The force of will is awe-inspiring, but there’s little question whom it flatters.

Strong isn’t the only one using relentless bombast as a de facto compass, and for whatever perceived failings can be held against The Apprentice, boredom shouldn’t be one of them. Like the man he seeks to interrogate, Abbasi is a born showman, and whatever his movie lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in kineticism. Cribbing liberally from Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street playbook, the helmer likes his debauchery hard and fast, with Kasper Tuxen’s athletic cinematography, as well as Olivier Bugge Coutté and Olivia Neergaard-Holm’s aggressive editing, driving up the MPH from start to finish. There’s a regrettable pleasure in vicariously living life in the fast lane, and for as seedy and dastardly as things get, their pull is undeniable.

This tendency to make heedlessly bold claims now and accept questions later leads us to the second directive: Admit nothing, deny everything. Whether Sherman’s assertions take things too far or not far enough will be in the eye of the beholder, but the full-throated way he goes about unveiling them is unprecedented. Where Oliver Stone’s W. and Adam McKay’s Vice couched their more dangerous claims against a backdrop of empathy and satire, The Apprentice says the loud parts loudly, inventing innumerable scenarios that see Trump at his most vindictive. It’s plausible that truth aligns neatly with fiction, but the conversations here are nevertheless presumptive, amounting to a celluloid smear campaign that’s novel for its bravery.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, and having your movie’s subject describe your project as a ‘politically disgusting hatchet job’ made by ‘human scum’ is better marketing than money can buy. He almost had to respond, because there’s no way another Commander in Chief has ever been depicted committing sexual assault for the filmgoing masses to consume at their local theater. Again, this is not discrediting the film’s accusations, let alone those made by Ivana Trump or the myriad contestants in Donald’s beauty pageants over the years, but rather acknowledging their forthright candor. The endless, thinly-veiled allusions to Cohn’s closeted sexual proclivities take on the same more-is-more tactics; There’s no need to provide the receipts when your ongoing purchases are drawing this much attention.

Which brings us to Cohn’s final maxim: Claim victory and never admit defeat. This one won’t be difficult considering Abbasi’s audience, with the left-leaning viewers in sturdy agreement with the flick’s far-reaching denouncement, and their counterparts likely neglecting to participate. It helps to have champions, especially when your plans are of the scorched earth variety, though one wonders about the necessity of preaching to the choir. No one will walk away from The Apprentice with a change of heart. That’s what happens when you shoot fish in a barrel that’s been carefully designed to appease onlookers. The scene of Trump lying motionless on an operating table as doctors perform liposuction surgery has its ghastly appeal, but mockery isn’t the same as retribution.

Liberals will have to take their wins where they can get them for the next four(?) years, and there’s nothing wrong with serving up a pound of flesh to the starving snowflakes. It just doesn’t amount to much beyond simple entertainment, analogous to watching John Rambo mow down scores of people in the name of retribution. Abbasi and Sherman are scoring their triumph against either a straw man or a monolith; in either case, the parade was scheduled before principle photography was set in motion, arranged by using the tools of the enemy. They might seek to cut Trump down to size, but they’re just living in his shadow like the rest of us, unwittingly drawn in by his bravado, with only petulant, fleeting joy to show for it. Are you not entertained?