The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s first film in English, is a dramatisation of the formative friendship between Donald Trump, played by Sebastian Stan, and power broker Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong. Most of it is set during the 1970s and early 1980s but Abbasi largely pulls back from the New Hollywood pastiche that was in vogue about a decade ago. Instead, he opts for an off-the-cuff 70s vibe, relying mainly on stock footage and montage sequences to establish the period, and driving the aesthetic of the film more through the architecture and décor of the Trump Empire; especially Trump Tower, and Trump’s extraordinary apartment at the top of Trump Tower, which is recreated in loving detail here, and whose smoky glass and greenhouse-like protuberances set the stage for the entire film. At one point Trump even jokes that his job is “designing ceilings,” while Ivana, played by Maria Bakalova, does décor.

As that might suggest, Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay is very much focused on Trump the property baron. We first meet Trump as an up-and-coming slumlord, framed in New Hollywood desuetude, but desperate to differentiate himself from it in his efforts to gentrify New York City, first and foremost by constructing a luxury hotel on 42^nd Street, a prospect that was unthinkable to virtually everyone in the property world except him at this point in time. We see Trump’s restlessness to distinguish his property values from those of his father Fred, played by Martin Donovan, especially since his brother Freddy, played by Charlie Carrick, has little interest in entering the family business, meaning that the Trump name rests on Donald’s shoulders alone. During these early scenes, Abbasi does a great job of capturing Trump as a character, rather than a mere caricature, without ever tritely “humanising” him.

Of course, the centre of the film is Trump’s relationship with Cohn and the way in which Trump’s ascent through the world of power and property was brokered through Cohn’s homosexual regard. Many of the early scenes in the film take place in intimate deal-brokering spaces that capture the hustle and flow of the era (“this is a nation of men, not laws”) but simultaneously evoke the cruisey proximity of the gay bathhouse, epitomised by the piercing stare with which Cohn initiates their friendship. Under Cohn’s guidance, Trump soon discovers his mission “to make New York a fabulous place again,” a proto-MAGA sentiment, and yet when he offers to pay back his mentor, Cohn asks only for his friendship. Interestingly, Cohn isn’t exactly closeted in the film – he denies his homosexuality to the media but around his friends and business partners he’s quite open about having a male life partner, as well as keeping a harem of young men for orgiastic happenings. Like J. Edgar Hoover, he’s caught at the nexus between public and private life, perhaps even more public and more private at this later stage in gay visibility, and like Hoover too, he responds with an intense surveillance impulse. At one point, he takes Trump into his “playroom,” a recording booth in a closet off his bedroom, where he reveals the tapes of every single conversation that occurs in his house.

From there, it’s fascinating to see how Trump’s self-realisation takes place against Cohn’s fantasies of him. At one point, we cut from him grabbing Trump and writhing with him on the floor to Trump making his first property pitch. At another point, Cohn blackmails a member of the justice department to further Trump’s career, by threatening to tell his wife that he’s a “fairy”: “The last time I checked, homosexuals were barred from civil service.” However, the critical moment comes when Trump needs a tax break for the ultra-wealthy. Turning up at Cohn’s house in the middle of the night, Trump begs for his help and, when Cohn reassures him of his protection, Trump exclaims “I love you” before wrapping him in a huge bear hug. It culminates with opening night at Trump Tower, set to the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of “Always on My Mind,” as homeland and heartland Americana is wryly inflected to a queerer modality.

Much of this plays out in quite comic and absurd terms. It’s enjoyably weird to see Trump play the passive role in this relationship (in any relationship), especially since he’s quite demure and strait-laced when he enters the New York scene. In a sense, Cohn introduces him to the libidinal core of Republicanism – embracing the perversity of carnal desires while enhancing it with the second-order pleasure of regulating other people’s desires. At a birthday party for Cohn, Trump wanders upstairs to find his mentor in the midst of a frentic orgy, being penetrated by a member of his harem wearing a Ronald Reagan mask. Likewise, it’s quite comic how out of place Ivana is in the libidinal economy of the film. Heterosexual desire doesn’t really resonate in the intense homosocial bond between Trump and Cohn, and Cohn realises it, insisting that Trump get a prenup, and catching the bouquet at their wedding. The look on Ivana’s face during this moment is priceless. Even when Trump and Cohn drift apart, and become antagonistic, Cohn still holds more sway for Trump than Ivana ever does.

This alienation between the two men occupies the second half of the film, which is where we start to see Trump’s hardline persona emerge as well. The tipping-point comes when the mayor refuses to give him a tax break for Trump Tower, and from there his mendacity starts to emerge, and target Cohn. His first stand-off with Cohn occurs just after he’s pushed into a line, and has his mouth full of food, and quickly gives way to the news of Freddy Trump’s death, days after he has failed to heed the warning signs of his declining mental health. It may be my own biases but I thought Stan started to look more and more like Trump during these scenes, if only because this persona is much more familiar in the era of his presidential campaigns. As with so many other trajectories in the film, this dissociation of Trump and Cohn also crystallises around the opening of Trump Tower, where Cohn first exhibits clear symptoms of AIDS. Ironically, Cohn gets just what he wants from Trump here – a confession that he has become indifferent to Ivana – but the same coldness also extends to Cohn himself.

This paves the way for the third and strongest act of the film, in which we start to see the origin of more discrete aspects of Trump’s public and presidential personality, all of them centred on his obsession with the purity and contamination of his own body and the body politic in turn. We see his confidence in misinformation as he blithely explains to his doctor why exercise is bad for the body. We see his neurosis in his anxiety about whether he has contracted AIDS from a conversation with Cohn on the street outside Trump Tower. And we see his trolling tendencies, his willingness to say anything, in this conversation itself, which starts with Cohn confronting him for kicking his bedridden partner out of his suite in the tower, and ends with Trump mocking him for having AIDS: “Don’t get sick…it’s a little cold.”

What ensues reminded me of Lauren Berlant’s essay “Thinking About Feeling Historical.” In this essay, Berlant draws upon two completely different utterances, one from George W. Bush about his regret over the Iraq War, and one from Essex Hemphill about the impact of AIDS on black gay masculinity, to capture the inchoate and dissonant ways people deal with an irreducibly complex present. Something of that dissonance occurs in the last scenes of The Apprentice, starting with a phone conversation in which Trump’s doctor assures him that AIDS is not an airborne illness. Just as Berlant examines a specific phrase from both Hemphill (“Now we think…as we fuck”) and Bush (“I think about Iraq every day”), Abbasi moves from a Trump gesture (patting his face in relief at his exemption from AIDS) to a Cohn gesture (lifting his body slightly from the hospital bed back in his darkened mansion) to capture an irreducible present moment in the mid-80s whose ramifications and resonances continue in this election.

The sadistic energies behind Trumpism, and grievance politics more generally, reach their full horror when Trump, now confident in his inability to contract AIDS, makes contact with Cohn again. The very act of making contact becomes a way of insisting on this difference and superiority, as Trump brings his former mentor to live (or die) in Mar-A-Lago, holds a birthday dinner in his honour (so different from the Reagan-masked orgiastic frenzy of the first act) and gives him a pair of cufflinks that turn out to be pewter. Cohn dies shortly after, and the film ends by cutting between three different sequences: Cohn’s funeral, Trump obsessively disinfecting and sanitising Cohn’s wheelchair and dinner place at Mar-a-Lago, and a series of gruesome close-ups of Trump’s own plastic surgery and hair restoration surgery, the latter of which requires a section of his scalp to be removed so that the skin over his skull can be tightened. In this final montage we see a concise vision of the Trumpian politic, a scrupulous differentiation of bodies that matter from bodies that don’t, to use a term from Judith Butler. By the time we end with Trump pitching The Art of the Deal, he almost feels like a cyborg, a missive from the dystopian science-fiction future that his second presidency may bring about.