120 min | R | October 11, 2024 | Briarcliff Entertainment
Ali Abbasi makes a film about how Donald Trump became Donald Trump. Sebastian Stan disappears into the role. Jeremy Strong steals the film as Roy Cohn.
Young Donald Trump is a landlord’s son collecting rent in Brooklyn in the 1970s. He wants Manhattan. He wants to be someone. He meets Roy Cohn at a club and Cohn sees something useful in Trump’s ambition and desperation. Cohn teaches Trump three rules. Attack. Deny everything. Claim victory regardless of the outcome. The film follows their relationship from the 1970s through the 1980s as Trump absorbs Cohn’s methods and Cohn watches his creation outgrow and discard him. Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman frame this as an origin story for American sociopathy. The student surpasses the master by becoming worse than the master ever imagined.
Sebastian Stan plays Trump with physical precision that goes beyond imitation. He captures the posture, the hand gestures, the way Trump occupies space as if he owns it before he does. Stan plays the young Trump as almost sympathetic. Hungry and insecure and desperate for his father’s approval. The transformation across the film is gradual and devastating. By the final act Stan is playing a different person. The warmth is gone. The neediness has calcified into entitlement. Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn as a predator who mistakes cruelty for strength and loyalty for ownership. Strong’s performance is the film’s engine. He is funny and terrifying and pathetic in his final scenes. Maria Bakalova plays Ivana Trump with dignity that the film allows to be systematically dismantled. Martin Donovan plays Fred Trump with cold authority.
Abbasi shot the early scenes on grainy film stock that evokes 1970s New York with textural authenticity. The cinematography by Kasper Tuxen shifts as the decades progress. The 1970s sequences are warm and gritty. The 1980s sequences are colder and more polished. The production design tracks Trump’s aesthetic evolution from his father’s utilitarian buildings to the gold and marble excess of Trump Tower. The editing by Olivia Neergaard-Holm and Olivier Bugge Coutté structures the film as a corruption narrative. Each scene adds a layer of moral deterioration. The score is restrained and lets the performances carry the emotional weight.
The film had to fight to find American distribution. That context is inseparable from the experience of watching it. Abbasi treats Trump not as a political figure but as a character study in how power corrupts ambition into pathology. The film argues that Trump is not an aberration. He is a product. Cohn made him. New York made him. The system that rewarded his worst instincts made him. Whether the audience needs a film to explain what decades of public behavior already demonstrate is a fair question. But Abbasi and his cast make the telling worth watching.