The film premiered at Cannes and nearly lost its distribution until Briarcliff Entertainment stepped in to ensure the American public saw Trump's origin story.

Work began on Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice back in 2018, when Donald Trump was president, but it’s just now hitting the 2024 movie calendar, mere weeks before Trump will find out if it will be him or Kamala Harris moving into the White House come January.

Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, and co-star Maria Bakalova speak to IndieWire at the NYC premiere of 'The Apprentice.'

"The Apprentice" explores Trump's ascent to prominence in the '70s and '80s, long before his political career. It also highlights his connection with the notorious attorney Roy Cohn.

Stan as a young Donald Trump and Strong as his mentor Roy Cohn are absolutely gripping in director Ali Abbasi's less-than-flattering cinematic portrait.

“The Apprentice,” directed by the Iranian-Danish filmmaker Abbasi and scripted by Gabriel Sherman, puts the Cohn-Trump relationship at its center, and in doing so, gives Strong and Stan two of the best roles of their careers. Strong calls Cohn “probably the single most fascinating person I’ve ever studied and interrogated and attempted to inhabit.”

Is it just my imagination, or is “The Apprentice” a pretty interesting movie? Less than a month before a U.S. presidential election, you’d expect an 11th-hour Trump biopic (which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival) to settle for cheap smears and a bunch of propaganda.