I think it says a lot that a film like this can be made about someone who is now the sitting president of the United States of America.

I suspect if they had tried to get it off the ground after the election they may have had more trouble. It declares from the outset that it is based on real people but has been fictionalised. This covers them perhaps against litigation but there’s no aspect of the film that doesn’t feel real. That the director is Iranian – Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider, Border) – makes me think that there is a unique perspective here from someone who knows what despotism looks like.

 It is the story of the making of the Donald Trump we know now (played by Sebastian Stan). Starting with his early days as a rent collector for his father‘s real estate business, we see him meet Roy Cohn, the lawyer who would be so important in the making of Trump the billionaire.

Roy Cohn, played quite brilliantly by Jeremy Strong, is an unsmiling whippet of a man who has three cardinal rules – one is to attack attack attack, two is to deny deny deny and three is to claim victory no matter what the real facts are. In this we see the kindling of the disinformation that is now standard in the world of Trump.

Sebastian Stan completely inhabits the character of Trump, nailing his odd little quirk of pouting his lips forwards on certain words. He also gets his naïveté and bluff that we see slowly give away to egotism and brashness. It feels like he plays Trump as smarter than how he seems at the moment, showing his awkward moments and also his overreaching, his poor business deals because he is so committed to getting anything that he wants, even his whims.

There are some awful moments – his treatment of his wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) and how he distances himself from Cohn and his last months. Although there is a sense of justice in this, there’s no way to feel triumphant at this early sign of homophobia and callousness to someone’s suffering.

All the beats are good, it holds you with the narrative, it’s audacious and it’s fascinating seeing the lifting of the veil around Trump‘s early years. Walking out of the cinema though, and knowing that this man is the head of state of one of the most powerful nations, is essentially depressing. I felt empty and sad and bewildered that someone of this calibre could be upheld as a model for a nation. 

And of course it failed the Bechdel Test. True to form.