On 27 October, Donald Trump came home.

‘No city embodies the spirit, energy and potential of the American people more than where we are gathered tonight’, Trump told the crowd in New York city, after he arrived two hours later than scheduled. ‘I call it a beautiful oasis,’ he went on, ‘when I left New York was the place you wanted to be. And now people just don’t speak well of it, but we’re gonna bring it back and we’re going to bring it back strong.’

The new film, The Apprentice, finds Trump in the heady New York fray of the 1970s amid pulsing lights and music, beginning his inexorable rise as a young property developer and businessman. Political aspirations flicker only at the edges, mere glib references hinting at a life beyond the immediate spectacle. The Apprentice, written by the journalist Gabriel Sherman, is nonetheless a film wrapped around the biographer’s favourite axiom: ‘The Making of Donald Trump.’ Trump as a character – played delicately by Sebastian Stan – is moulded by his city, his family, and his associates, and he reacts with his own fervour for construction – of self, brand, city and country.

Donald works for his father, Fred, in the family business, building small-fare houses and extracting rent. The film opens as the Trump Corporation is being sued by the government for racial discrimination in the assignment of tenancies. Fred Trump, resembling a zombified Vito Corleone, presides over his clan from the head of the table. He belittles his eldest son, Fred Jr, for leaving the family enterprise to become an airline pilot and slipping into alcoholism, while he urges his younger son to be more cautious in his aspirations.

The Trump family’s world is the crime-ridden and dishevelled New York of the 1970s. This is ‘Fear City’ – as flyers handed out by the police labelled it – and the young Trump equates his ambitions with the fate of New York. Trump prowls around the shell of the Commodore Hotel in Manhattan with a business associate, explaining his hopes to buy and transform the building while being accosted by a man offering his wife to them.

The bridge for Trump from the rough-hewn world of his father’s Queens tenements – a life mired in modest housing projects and dodging confrontations with angry, impoverished tenants – to a realm of greater ambition arrives in the form of Roy Cohn, a lawyer and former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Bloodhound-like, in appearance and tenacity, and played mercilessly by Jeremy Strong – acclaimed for his performance as Kendall Roy in Succession – Cohn notices Trump across a dark private members club and invites him to join him for dinner.

Cohn becomes the guide for his young scion through New York’s murk of law and politics. Cohn is a dour fixer, willing to spout sophistry in court and threaten, cajole and blackmail outside. The film is restrained about Cohn’s background. The director, Ali Abassi, does not linger on his role as the associate of McCarthy’s worst excesses in the 1950s but invokes the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 and their execution two years later for spying for the Soviets. Cohn’s mentorship of Trump comes with constant invocations that everything he does, he does for America, and he is willing to spill blood.

Trump’s modern political career has been founded in part on the impression that he has attained so much economic success and insider status that he is financially liberated from the political shadows. He has seemed an outsider because he could stand apart – independent, undisciplined and uninhibited. In the film, Trump is unrelentingly ambitious for himself and his city; he plays the game shrewdly, all the more so to burn it down.

A perverse spirit of American striving therefore laces The Apprentice. Abbasi uses Cohn’s mentorship to bind Trump to a legacy of combative defiance toward political norms championed by McCarthy and Cohn. They were figures at the periphery of the establishment yet still firmly entrenched within it. Amid the terror of McCarthyism in the 1950s, Cohn and his boss wielded the insiders’ power while bearing the outsiders’ anger.

Trump succeeded in acquiring the Commodore Hotel in a takeover effort described at the time as ‘part shill game, part intrigue’, in 1976. ‘The brick facade of the Commodore was absolutely filthy’, he recalled, ‘and the lobby was so dingy it looked like a welfare hotel.’ The new owner encased the building in glass – ‘an utter and inexcusable outrage’ decried conservationists – and he had the interior renovated into a set of garish rooms. The extravagant opening ceremony in September 1980 counted the mayor and the governor of New York among its guests.

Cohn also makes Trump by bringing him into his bacchanal world of mobsters, artists, drugs and drink, which the young teetotaller watches with unease, haunted by his older brother’s descent into excess. Trump outgrows Cohn in the 1980s and, as Cohn dies of Aids – though he always insisted it was liver cancer – Trump fears that Cohn may pass on his illness to him. In the end, Trump feigns affection for his former mentor, but their friendship remains transactional, saturated in deceit. As one rises, so the other must fall.

Trump is – in film and reality – a man sustained by movement, but the task of finding a real Trump amid the momentum can be marred in imprecision. What The Apprentice supposes is that – behind the accruing makeup, hair dye, malapropisms and resentments – there was someone else. The modern Trump – the politician – needs a balancing symmetry with his past to be more than the caricature imagined by his critics. Yet it is a film written backwards from that caricature, nestling Trump in a world of public garishness, private depravity and secret sin. Ivana Trump, Donald’s first wife, is richly courted but brutally discarded; Cohn is left to languish in sickness. Reviews labelling the film a ‘supervillain origin story’ are now prominently displayed on posters.

In the film, Trump is even physically created, like a comic book antagonist. His suits are tailored, paid for by Cohn, and his hair is pomaded. In the last act, Trump lies on the bed watching the emaciated Cohn lie about his condition on television. At the end, he thrusts his lips outwards in a distinctive pout for the first time. In a final scene, we leave Trump on the operating table as his excess body fat is sucked out and the skin on his scalp is cleaved open, pulled up, and stapled shut.

The Apprentice confronts the disjointed challenge of having to be a standard film and also somehow a popular explainer for a former and possibly future president in a hugely consequential election. Within the confines of its setting and period, the actors and directors handle the subject well. But this isn’t a Donald Trump of or for the people who want him. It’s a Donald Trump to soothe through his depravity; a work of contorted history to reassure the preconception of his villainy.

One cannot escape an odour of unseemly self-indulgence in The Apprentice. The film commercially exploits its own message of fear and hatred in the midst of a modern horror story about Trump which it knows to be unfinished. Opportunities for clarity give way to simple validation – cold comfort on the brink of his return to the presidency.

Donald Trump’s own response on social media has been vehement:

‘A FAKE and CLASSLESS Movie written about me, called, The Apprentice (Do they even have the right to use that name without approval?), will hopefully “bomb.” It’s a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” My former wife, Ivana, was a kind and wonderful person, and I had a great relationship with her until the day she died. The writer of this pile of garbage, Gabe Sherman, a lowlife and talentless hack, who has long been widely discredited, knew that, but chose to ignore it. So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us. MAGA2024!’

The producers have since incorporated Trump’s post into adverts for the film.

The Apprentice is in cinemas now.