‘The Apprentice’ is the movie that Donald Trump tried to censor, but it is not nearly as incendiary as one might expect. It doesn’t exactly paint Trump, played by Sebastian Stan, in his 30s and 40s, as he built his real estate empire, in a glowing light, but there is nothing in the representation which would come as a surprise to anyone who has been studying Trump’s rise to, and fall from, the Presidency over the last decade. The aim of the film is to show how Trump’s penchant for self-aggrandizement and for overexaggeration was cultivated via his friendship with lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).

Indeed, ‘The Apprentice’ works as an origin story in which Trump is shown to emerge from a family with high expectations – Trump’s brother is shamed by their father Fred (Martin Donovan) for ‘merely’ being a pilot as the job amounts to little more than ‘driving a bus with wings’ – where we first see him driving around New York and working as a glorified rent collector for his father and towards building his own business empire in his own way, using his contacts and power to achieve the impossible, such as building Trump Tower without having to pay a dollar in tax.

Cohn is portrayed as an all-powerful, Machiavellian figure – one reviewer has even likened him to a Bond villain – who can manipulate Trump by effectively promising the earth if he would only follow his rules which include never admitting defeat and denying all accusations (again, the resonances with Trump’s later Presidency are far from subtle). In Shakespearean style, however, Trump ends up outflanking his mentor, with the power having discernibly shifted by the 1980s, with Trump no longer needing the creator who fashioned him in his own image. And Cohn’s death from what is strongly hinted at as being AIDS, but claimed by Cohn as liver cancer, becomes an opportunity for Trump to emerge even stronger.

He has taken on all of Cohn’s characteristics for himself and no longer has, or purportedly needs, anyone to guide or circumscribe him. Frankenstein’s monster has now upstaged and defeated his inventor and is now fully unleashed on the world as, the film has us believe, an uncontrollable narcissist. Cohn believes he can control everything, whereas Trump uses every opportunity that arises to exploit every situation in which he finds himself, and it is this interplay and trajectory which make this one of the best character studies in any film this year. One man’s ascent and the other’s descent – at the expense of the very man for whom he had been the protégé – makes ‘The Apprentice’ compelling viewing, and charts how the ugly side of the American Dream may, when untrammelled, lead all the way to the very top, from regional to global dominion.