Brutal. Vicious. Crooked.
Cruel. So filmmaker Ali Abbasi’s new biopic “The Apprentice” describes its dominant figure, a New York and Washington, D.C.
, power broker who lies, cheats, charms and browbeats his way into the uppermost ranks of American business and government. No, it’s not Donald Trump. It’s Roy Cohn.
As the film depicts with garish flair, the pugilistic, Bronx-born attorney — who first came to prominence prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, then served as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his anticommunist witch hunt — took Trump under his wing in the 1970s, handing the ambitious real-estate developer’s son a fiendish playbook for success. Attack, attack, attack.
Deny everything. Never admit defeat. By the time of his disbarment and death from AIDS complications in 1986, however, the roles were reversed, and Cohn lost sway with his erstwhile mentee as Trump stepped out of his shadow.
Throughout “The Apprentice,” Cohn comes across not only with his renowned ferocity, but also with uncommon empathy, courtesy of actor Jeremy Strong. “If Roy Cohn walked into this room right now, I don’t think I would want to shake his hand,” says Strong, 45, seated in a bar off the sun-dappled courtyard of the San Vicente Bungalows on an early fall afternoon. “But from the distance of a piece of work and trying to understand him — humanistically and creatively — I had to find, for lack of a better word, love.
Which is a bit .