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Join Telegram ChannelHow did Donald become Trump? Ali Abbasi sets out to answer it with Sebastian Stan in the central role and an impressive Jeremy Strong in that of his lawless mentor.
How did Donald become Trump? Ali Abbasi (Border, The Nights of Mashhad) examined the future American president in the 1970s, then an aspiring real estate entrepreneur but already armed with a ferocious appetite for winning, money and flashiness. The idea of this biopic not so conventional in form – the image treated in a worn VHS way, a gimmick a priori a bit clumsy, ultimately adds quite a bit to the subject – is to tell the origin of the male through his original flaw : a tyrannical father impossible to make proud. A very simple psychological mechanism, but one that Sebastian Stan sells admirably between imitations light from Trump's crooked mouth and real freedom of movement.
Facing him, Jeremy Strong (the series Succession) plays Roy Cohn, mentor as much as surrogate dad. Magnetic gaze and reptilian movements… The actor is immense in the skin of this crooked lawyer, pillar of McCarthyism, who will be devoured by his creation. A great film is hidden in these scenes of vampiric relationships (Cohn catches AIDS and declines visibly, while Trump continues to gain weight), but The Apprentice weakens at each obligatory passage (the construction of the Trump Tower…) and then descends to the level of a – good – HBO TV movie. The other error of the project is to insist on the fact that the era of post-truth would have been in the making from the start in Donald: a biopic cliché that Abbasi did not need to dissect the troubled personality of his subject .
Of Ali Abbasi With Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Iona Rose MacKay… Duration 2 hours. Released October 9, 2024