Election-eve release for unflattering Donald Trump bio-pic

The Apprentice, a disputed bio-pic about Donald Trump, will be released in cinemas less than one month before the US election.

Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in The Apprenticew. Picture: Patriot Pics / Backgrid

It is likely to be 2024’s most controversial movie.

The Apprentice, a bio-pic about Donald Trump which Trump’s legal team tried to shut down, will be released in Australia, the US and other countries in October, less than one month before the US election on November 5.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung has condemned the film, which includes a disputed rape scene, as “pure fiction” and “election interference by Hollywood elites’’.

The movie’s Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi denied this and insists his film offers a “humanistic” portrait of Trump.

The AP newswire has said that “by a landslide, The Apprentice is the most controversial movie of the American autumn” and “has had one of the most tortured paths to movie theatres of any 2024 release’’, while the Hollywood Reporter has described it as a “hot potato’’. The movie revolves around the early real estate deals of a young Donald Trump, played by Sebastian Stan, and Trump’s apparent, close relationship with ruthless lawyer Roy Cohn, who was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the notorious 1954 anti-communist hearings. Cohn is played by the Emmy Award-winning Succession star Jeremy Strong, who, in the just-released trailer, urges Trump to “attack, attack, attack’’ and “admit nothing, deny everything’’.

Named for the reality show that made Trump a household name, The Apprentice premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and includes a contentious scene in which Trump rapes his then-wife Ivana (played by Maria Bakalova).

In her 1990 divorce deposition, Ivana Trump claimed that Trump raped her. She subsequently retracted that claim, saying she had felt violated but didn’t mean to use the word rape literally. Trump denied the allegation.

Cheung said the film was a “pure malicious defamation (that) should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin … It belongs in a dumpster fire.”

Abbasi argues his film tries to get inside Trump’s psyche, stating at a press conference earlier this year: “The most despicable monster … also liked a dog or fell in love with someone … So if there’s an ideology to the film, it’s a humanistic ideology.’’

After the Trump “origin story” premiered at Cannes, Trump’s lawyers issued legal threats to potential distributors, while Dan Snyder, a pro-Trump billionaire who invested in the movie and then objected to it, tried to block its release.

For several months, the film – which attracted mixed reviews at Cannes – languished without a US distribution deal. But in August, independent US distributor Briarcliff Entertainment acquired the rights.

The film will be released in Australia on October 10 and in the US the following day.

As the timing of The Apprentice’s cinema release raised eyebrows, it was confirmed a short, positive documentary about Kamala Harris will be released on October 25 in the US.