Work began on Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice back in 2018, when Donald Trump was president, but it’s just now hitting the 2024 movie calendar, mere weeks before Trump will find out if it will be him or Kamala Harris moving into the White House come January.

Even in an election year, most seem to agree on one aspect about Ali Abbasi’s much-debated Donald Trump film “The Apprentice”: Sebastian Stan is a remarkably good Trump and Jeremy Strong is chillingly riveting as the New York power broker Roy Cohn.

Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, and co-star Maria Bakalova speak to IndieWire at the NYC premiere of 'The Apprentice.'

Stan as a young Donald Trump and Strong as his mentor Roy Cohn are absolutely gripping in director Ali Abbasi's less-than-flattering cinematic portrait.

While speaking with reporters on the red carpet, Stan shared that the timing of the film is "fortuitous" Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong are finally premiering their new movie about Donald Trump. On Tuesday,

“The Apprentice,” directed by the Iranian-Danish filmmaker Abbasi and scripted by Gabriel Sherman, puts the Cohn-Trump relationship at its center, and in doing so, gives Strong and Stan two of the best roles of their careers. Strong calls Cohn “probably the single most fascinating person I’ve ever studied and interrogated and attempted to inhabit.”

Pief Weyman Sebastian Stan is a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice, in theaters Friday. The film follows Trump’s journey to become the man we know him as today, through his beginnings as the protégé

Is it just my imagination, or is “The Apprentice” a pretty interesting movie? Less than a month before a U.S. presidential election, you’d expect an 11th-hour Trump biopic (which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival) to settle for cheap smears and a bunch of propaganda.

The “Apprentice” stars and the director Ali Abbasi say their film is a “humanistic” treatment of the former president and his mentor, Roy Cohn.