Donald Trump is the talk of le town.
The controversial movie “The Apprentice,” depicting the former president’s rise to fame in New York high society during the 1970s, premiered Monday at the Cannes Film Festival in France to a glamorous crowd including Cate Blanchett and Bella Hadid.
The movie received a standing ovation ranging from eight to 11 minutes, according to accounts.
In the drama, Sebastian Stan plays a younger Trump as he meets power lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong of “Succession”) and first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”).
While his political ambitions are said to be hinted at, “The Apprentice” does not cover the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections or Trump’s four years in the White House. It also has nothing to do with the NBC reality TV series he hosted.
What it does have, according to viewers, are shocks aplenty.
During one cringey scene, Trump is said to get liposuction and a hair transplant.
And, in another jarring moment, he violently rapes Ivana.
Trump’s late ex-wife really did allege a sexual assault in her 1989 divorce deposition, but later retracted the claim in 2015 as he was running for the Oval Office.
“The story is totally without merit,” Ivana, who died in 2022, said. “Donald and I are the best of friends and together have raised three children that we love and are very proud of.”
Critics on the Côte d’Azur were divided on director Ali Abbasi’s feature.
Variety called the movie “a spirited, entertaining, and not overly cheeky docudrama about the years in which Donald Trump came to be Donald Trump.”
But the left-leaning Guardian skewered it as a “cartoon” in a two-star review (out of five). “In sketching out his pre-White-House career, ‘The Apprentice’ worryingly moves us back to the old Donald, the joke Donald who had a cameo in ‘Home Alone 2’ and of course his own hit TV show, the joke that is now beyond unfunny,” they said. “It feels obtuse and irrelevant.”
An outspoken fan was Oliver Stone, who’s no stranger to commander-in-chief cinema, having directed “JFK,” “Nixon” and “W.”
“I think it’s spectacular,” Stone told Deadline. “It’s dramatic. It’s not about politics, it’s about character. It’s ‘Citizen Kane’ in that regard.”
There was some behind-the-scenes drama heading into the film’s premiere.
Sources told Variety that billionaire Dan Snyder, a friend of Trump’s, was “furious” with the movie he had invested money in.
The trade reported that Snyder “was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president. Snyder finally saw a cut of the film in February and was said to be furious.”
“The Apprentice” does not have US distribution.
