The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024).
The Apprentice (2024), released to theaters just in time to herald Donald Trump’s reelection to the American presidency, emerges from the same impulse that has motivated much national news coverage of Trump since the 2016 presidential campaign. The screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, as a political journalist for New York magazine and Vanity Fair, is among those who fed the seemingly endless appetite for Trump content that emerged during his first campaign a decade ago, serving up a buffet of can-you-believe-this stories to be breathlessly recirculated within the liberal outrage echo chamber. Implicit in such coverage is the notion that any Trump supporter must be laboring under some fundamental misapprehension, and that if the plain truth about his history and character could only be stated loudly and frequently enough, it would universally be understood to be disqualifying.
The film, like the last three Democratic presidential campaigns, airs the same dirty laundry that has been hanging in plain sight for a half-century: Trump’s origins as a racist slumlord and his opportunistic use of tax abatements, bankruptcy law, and shady accounting to build his tycoon image; his vanity and cheapness; his rape of his first wife, Ivana (as described by her in a deposition during their divorce proceedings, later recanted). The film is a comprehensive portrait less of Trump himself than, implicitly, of an entire era of liberal outrage he inspired.
The unique gotcha the film adds to this litany is Trump’s long association with Roy Cohn (played here by Jeremy Strong), the communist-ferreting McCarthyite, mob lawyer, New York power player, closeted gay sybarite, AIDS casualty, as well as, in the film’s telling, Trump’s most significant professional mentor. A far more psychologically complex and politically multivalent figure than the transparent and profoundly uninteresting Trump, Cohn has inspired a far more fascinating cinematic canon. He has become a figure, like Hamlet or the Joker, against whom ambitious actors test themselves, and whose on-screen depictions are likewise a window into performance styles, industrial conventions, and sociopolitical zeitgeists as they evolve across the decades.
Point of Order (Emile de Antonio, 1964).
In Cohn’s first major screen appearance, he plays himself: Point of Order (1963), Emile de Antonio’s documentary of the Army–McCarthy Hearings of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations in the spring of 1954, during which Cohn served as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel. The hearings, which led to McCarthy’s political downfall, were broadcast live on the emergent medium of network television—a signal moment during the first decade of truly televised American political discourse, between Roy Disney’s “I Like Ike” ad of 1952 and the Kennedy–Nixon debates in 1960—and the film was assembled from kinescope recordings from the CBS archives. With no narration and minimal title cards, the film has a lightly didactic, high-minded immediacy: utilitarian in its embrace of modern image-making technology, it promises frank, educational access to national institutions, in the style of other direct cinema of its era.
Cohn, 27 years old at the time of the hearings, was already established as the primary boogeyman of the second Red Scare for his role in securing the convictions and executions of the Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (accomplished, he would later boast, by means of flagrantly unethical ex parte conversations with the trial judge). Though Cohn and McCarthy were enemies of the anti-establishment left, Point of Order celebrates a victory of liberal institutions. Rather than undertake a First Amendment defense of American communists, a bipartisan Senate came after McCarthy and Cohn for their unconstitutional overreach—attacking the Army with shadily sourced accusations of harboring subversives—and for their mishandling of classified documents.
More specifically, McCarthy was brought down because Americans didn’t like how long a leash he gave his attack dog. In de Antonio’s edit of the nearly 200 hours of footage, Cohn is frequently murmuring into his boss’s ear, or reaching down to the desk to rearrange the papers the Senator refers to as he speaks. When a rival missteps, Cohn smiles, shakes his head, and feeds McCarthy his next line. Watching the proceedings from under hooded eyes, Cohn appears restless even when still—it is impossible to imagine him happy. A child prodigy who lived with his mother until her death, in his middle age, Cohn speaks in rounded, nasal Bronx vowels; he tries to play the nice Jewish boy, but he seethes throughout his solicitous banter with the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch. When the senators start in joking about homosexual activity on military bases, Cohn’s laughter is palpably stilted.
The hearings came about because G. David Schine, a handsome and unqualified McCarthy staffer in whom Cohn had taken an interest, had been drafted into the Army as a private, and Cohn had hounded and bullied his superior officers to try to secure him a commission and special privileges, like non-regulation boots—when McCarthy goes over this point, Cohn jumps in with his shoe size. (“Thirteen!”) Even McCarthy had joked apologetically to Army brass about Cohn’s intensity: “He thinks Dave should be a general and work from the penthouse of the Waldorf.”
Cohn was a pushy little striver love-bombing the military-industrial complex on behalf of his dumb-jock crush, and while the rest of Washington could tolerate his red-baiting as long as it benefited them politically, they were put off by him personally. Rather than a rejection of McCarthyism, Point of Order documents a political establishment disciplining McCarthy, revealed as a ponderous dullard, and recoiling from Cohn, overwhelmed by the vehemence of his crusade and scornful of the ardency of his conflicting desires. He had become an inconvenient creep, whose stigmatized sexuality was only barely subtextual. At times in the film, Cohn, a natural-born inquisitor, seems to recognize his own scapegoating—watch the rueful, smirking way his mouth moves when Welch cracks a joke about a “Pixie” (a subminiature 16mm camera of the day) being “a close relative of a fairy.”
The bow-tied Welch was a partner at one of the white-shoe firms that would become WilmerHale, but comes off as a simple-country-lawyer type with his folksy, kindly voice and commonsensical questioning (he parlayed his fame from the hearings into a Golden Globe–nominated turn in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, 1959). He plays the adult in the room, but his sarcastic, supercilious browbeating of Cohn, his barely disguised contempt, is striking, and worked to bait McCarthy: Welch’s famous “Have you no sense of decency?” exchange came after McCarthy, wounded by Welch’s questioning of Cohn, hit back at one of Welch’s juniors, Fred Fisher, bringing up his former membership of the left-wing Lawyers Guild. Welch’s tenderhearted defense of his golden boy—“I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you”—was far more effective political theater than McCarthy’s hammering away, and Cohn, along with everyone in the room except his boss, recognized it immediately. He shifts in his seat and rolls his eyes queasily as McCarthy continues to belabor the point, his self-preservation instinct going into overdrive.
Top: Point of Order (Emile de Antonio, 1964). Bottom: Citizen Cohn (Frank Pierson, 1992).
Cohn’s notoriety served him well in his subsequent decades as an attorney in private practice and a New York City society fixture: he was valued more for his bullishness and favor-trading than for his legal mind. His vulnerability as a gay man, briefly glimpsed in Point of Order, was minimized during his years as a power broker. It definitively resurfaced following his death in 1986 from AIDS (which he insisted to the end was liver cancer) and the public revelation of his homosexuality, long an open secret in New York gay circles.
1988 saw the release of two Cohn biographies, one of which, Nicholas von Hoffman’s Citizen Cohn, was adapted into another TV movie in 1992, this one starring James Woods. Woods described Cohn as “enigmatic,” a fascinating challenge, highlighting a story from the biography in which Cohn “once addressed a fund-raiser and delivered a diatribe about gays, and then promptly jumped into a limousine for Studio 54 and was flamboyant on the dance floor with his gay friends.” But the film is more interested in Cohn as a villain of recent history, which it compresses with hysterical newsreel bluntness into a cascade of expository dialogue and box-ticking psychology, noting his adoring, overbearing Jewish mother (Lee Grant) and his association with fellow closeted culture warriors J. Edgar Hoover (Pat Hingle) and Cardinal Francis Spellman (Daniel Benzali), giving the name-dropping biopic a frisson of the historical revisionism popular in the years following Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991).
Woods does not play Cohn as an enigma; his performance is extroverted and in constant forward motion. His Cohn is a virile motormouth even when caked in dying-man makeup: a cursing, sneering ham. Cohn is introduced rising from his deathbed and tossing aside his oxygen mask to snarl “fuck you” to a snooty doctor. Woods described Cohn’s quirks—leaning over the dinner table to eat the food off his dining companions’ plates; appearing in public with the drainage tubes from a recent facelift dangling from behind his ears—as a “feast” for an actor, and indeed, he transcends the film’s extremely rote portrait by turning it from a study of Cohn’s pathology into a self-portrait of the actor’s own congruent perversity. As an actor, a social-media user, and a culture-war figure, he has demonstrated a certain relish for combat, and his lizard-brained portrayal of one of the great American antagonists is in some sense a preview of contemporary grievance politics.
Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (Jill Godmilow, 1994).
Like James Woods, the avant-garde theatermaker Ron Vawter was inspired by the story from von Hoffman’s biography in which Cohn delivers a homophobic speech before a night on the town with his male date. In his one-man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, Vawter performed an imagined version of that speech as a monologue, which he and the writer Gary Indiana drew from Cohn’s own public statements. In the second half of the show, Vawter recreated “What’s Underground about Marshmallows,” a 1981 performance by Jack Smith; he found the director of Flaming Creatures (1963) an intimidating, unapologetic, confrontational figure in art and life, and was moved to juxtapose him with Cohn. “I was interested in how these two very different people reacted and responded to a society that set out to repress their sexuality,” he explained. “I sometimes refer to them as chameleons, creatures that changed the color of their skin to avoid being eaten. The particular coloration of Jack Smith and Roy Cohn were so wildly different. I wanted to look at how the homosexual hides and disguises, camouflages him or herself from a hostile society.” Vawter had learned he was HIV-positive in 1989, shortly before embarking on Roy Cohn/Jack Smith; he was diagnosed with AIDS just months before the premiere in the spring of 1992 at the Performing Garage, the SoHo headquarters of the experimental theater collective The Wooster Group, and died of it in 1994, six months after remounting the show in 1993 at another downtown alternative venue, The Kitchen, in a performance filmed by Jill Godmilow.
The film came about during a moment in which the American independent film boom accommodated downtown theatermakers: Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio had been filmed by Oliver Stone in 1988; Tom Noonan would adapt his play What Happened Was for the screen in 1994. A founding member of the Wooster Group, Vawter had by this time begun to cross over into movie roles, along with his collaborators Willem Dafoe and Spalding Gray, and by the early 1990s, the scene that launched their careers had begun to change, facing down New York’s gentrification and ravaged by AIDS. “I’ve got friends whose lives have been really damaged by the way [Cohn] chose to be, and I don’t forgive him,” Vawter said. “I wanted to use the play to get even, as a warning to others and to myself.”
The text of the Roy Cohn monologue is a vintage example of the scarifying, sarcastic wit and riled-up political conscience for which Gary Indiana was remembered upon his death earlier this fall. Full of vitriolic red-meat conservative politics, the speech is, Vawter said, a “mask,” which occasionally slips into innuendo. But his Cohn, flamboyant and shrill, is a hateful caricature and virtuoso performance, its Jewishness and effeminacy exaggerated and thrown all the way to the back rows in moments of high emotion, flaunting the markers of the outsider status that Cohn repressed—as Vawter does with even greater potency after the intermission, when he re-emerges as the outré queer underground figure Smith, wearing harem garb and baring enough skin that his lesions are visible. Around this time, Vawter had appeared in Philadelphia (1993) alongside Tom Hanks, whose character climactically bares lesions applied by the makeup department, but in conjuring the spirits of two confrontational men, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith is no play for sympathy. The film is one voice in the chorus of gay rage that emerged during the era of AIDS activism, resounded throughout the New Queer Cinema, and faced down the reactionary backlash of the NEA culture wars in the early 1990s.
Angels in America (Mike Nichols, 2003).
By other reckonings, the dawn of the 1990s was a hopeful time: experimental AIDS drugs showing promise, the Berlin Wall falling, a baby-boomer Democrat entering the White House. Such is the context for Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a work in direct conversation with the sweep of history, in which Cohn’s inclusion among the cast of characters is a statement of intent.
The Cohn of Angels in America is an avatar of the Reaganism that dominates the play’s mid-1980s setting. For the young, closeted Mormon attorney Joe Pitt, the professional opportunities dangled by Cohn, with his direct line to the White House, offer proximity to power—a tempting bet on self-preservation during the AIDS crisis and a time of relatively hegemonic cultural conservatism, even if it does come at the cost of denial and self-erasure. To Cohn, Joe is an unformed, potentially available bright boy to be groomed, à la G. David Schine; in his introductory scene, he works the phones in his office as Joe looks on, switching lines, pulling strings, brokering deals, gossiping and arranging, keeping the world spinning. Many actors who have played these roles have understood the scene as a seduction. In the 2003 HBO miniseries, Al Pacino plays it droll and bitchy, using that gruff, baggy voice and his electric surges and retreats of anger to convey a jaded intimacy with the workings of power.
This Cohn is, as he tells his doctor, not a homosexual, because “homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows”; he’s a heterosexual who enjoys sex with men—a compartmentalization so extreme that he must also take some pleasure in his own hypocrisy. Pacino’s natural speaking voice has a little of Cohn’s Bronx whine, and even more of his slyness, but as the play goes on, the actor, who had directed himself as Richard III in 1996, and would play Shylock the following year, throws himself into Kushner’s frothing oratory. This is Pacino in his butch antihero mode, further along the road that started with Michael Corleone and wended its way through Tony Montana, charismatic for the way he exults in the pleasures of corruption; his Cohn is a very devilish advocate indeed. Kushner, like Milton, gives the devil the best lines, but welcomes him back home among the angels, as it were. As Cohn clings to life, he squeezes pleasure out of his rhetorical battles with the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the embodiment of his buried guilt (intriguingly, this is also a device in Citizen Cohn, which aired between the premieres of the play’s two parts). But when he dies, she says Kaddish over him as his gay nurse Belize redistributes his illicit stash of AZT. In death, Cohn becomes a member of the clubs he would never have joined, alongside the likes of Jack Smith; in Kushner’s telling, this is a form of belonging and a kind of grace. Cohn’s homecoming is an act of reconciliation that precedes the thaw of the play’s happy ending, a triumph and consolidation of end-of-history liberalism that was already dated at the time the miniseries aired, a decade after the play won the Pulitzer.
Pacino’s first television credit of note, the Angels in America miniseries was directed by another bona fide A-lister in Mike Nichols. The adaptation insists on its gravitas, making concessions to realism by paring back the doubling and tripling of roles, taking advantage of CGI to realize Brechtian stage effects, and filming on location in New York. It contributes to an impression, despite the stylized dialogue of Kushner’s largely faithful teleplay, of real-world relevance apt for a medium then entering its so-called Golden Age—at the same Emmy Awards at which Angels in America won every category in which it was nominated, another HBO production, The Sopranos, finally toppled The West Wing to win Outstanding Drama Series, becoming the first cable show to claim TV’s top prize.
In the years since the premiere of Kushner’s play, Roy Cohn has become part of the repertory. Young actors who were involved with the play in the 1990s are now old enough to play Cohn, the same way that Ralph Richardson played Prince Hal before he played Falstaff. Cohn is now a figure larger than Angels in America, not merely a footnote to the story of the Cold War and Red Scare, or gay life and AIDS. During the first Trump administration, the president’s formative relationship with Cohn was held up as a kind of decoder ring to the roots of his pathological politics, and there was a renewed interest in Cohn. The bio-doc Where’s My Roy Cohn? (2019) takes its title from an infamous Oval Office lament. Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn (2020)—directed by Ivy Meeropol, a granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—takes its title from Cohn’s square on the AIDS Quilt.
The Apprentice (Ali Abassi, 2024).
The Apprentice is set around Cohn’s dressing-gown years, the time when he was most free in his private life, but its interest in him is primarily for his connection to Trump, which the film portrays as another sexually ambiguous mentor-protégé relationship. Cohn first spies the young Trump (Sebastian Stan) across the room in a private club, gazing at him without blinking, as if cruising him. As the Cohn of Angels in America did with Joe Pitt, he lets the dim young Trump watch him work the phone, inviting him behind the curtain and teaching him the aggressive, obstructionist legal tactics that served them both so well. Trump—who has described his sex life during the AIDS epidemic as an ordeal of survival equivalent to military service in Vietnam—is depicted as spooked and disgusted by Cohn’s diagnosis, having the staff at Mar-a-Lago wipe down the surfaces after his former friend’s death. His toxic legacy is reduced to that of a supporting player in the unfolding drama of our era’s undisputed main character, his death wielded in the service of a familiar #resistance talking point about Trump’s habit of using and discarding people. The film follows much liberal criticism of Trump in centering his vulgarity and lack of deference to norms, rather than the material consequences of his politics.
Strong, a standard-bearer for modern debates about the emotional and ethical burdens of Method acting, steps into a character previously played by his idol Pacino with a palpable sense of purpose, as if rising to the challenge of finding a way into Cohn, unearthing a relatable kernel of humanity at his core. His performance is full of worked-out, well-researched physical gestures, particularly a deadened, open-mouthed stare and a peculiar way of bobbling his head up and down with each syllable; with his taut skin and sleepy eyes, he looks like a turtle. The actor speaks in the same low, flat, aggressive voice, with the same bulldozing rhythms, that he uses on Succession (2018–23) as Kendall Roy, another tireless aspirant who comes on too strong, a self-fashioned outsider railing against his own rejection. The internal drive and external transformation distinguish the performance as a feat of immersion, in the no-one-is-a-villain-to-themselves vein—this was a real person with real subjectivity and acting requires empathy—but this sense of identification is misplaced without the counterweight of Succession’s satirical distance. If the performance is not strictly an imitation, it’s still literal-minded, and reveals the limitations of the film’s dutiful historical reenactment, the dead-end result of an action-item approach to making an impact in the world. In both Angels in America and Citizen Cohn, a dying Cohn spars rhetorically with ghosts from his and America’s past, so that his death is a resolution of generational traumas, but here, as Strong throws himself into Cohn’s physical decline, his slack muscles and frailty, he becomes a figure of pathos on a human scale. Screen and stage portrayals have vacillated between treating Cohn as a psychological and physical problem, or a political and symbolic one. The Roy Cohn of The Apprentice is only a man, but the real Roy Cohn was a metaphor, a myth.