‘Looks like an SNL sketch’: The first clip of Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump is here and it’s giving…not what people were expecting

Well folks, the Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice will hit theaters in the United States on Oct. 11, not even a full month before the United States presidential election is due to kick off. Suffice to say that the pieces will fall where they may.

With a sturdy showing at Cannes (the film currently sits at a 73 percent critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes) having been under its belt since May, next on The Apprentice‘s agenda is to give us a glimpse of what we’re in for:

Here, Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) are chilling in a limousine, where Cohn hands a telephone to Trump and puppeteers a glitzy, bloated business pitch out of Trump’s mouth, complete with ambitious promises and the idea of confidence rather than actual confidence.

As it turns out, showing off the film with this scene was a rather bold choice, because the denizens of X have responded with a verdict that ranges from uneasy to unimpressed.

Indeed, there’s no denying the awkwardness of the scene, but in all likelihood, the way this scene seems to think that it’s cinematic in spite of being thoroughly uncinematic, is both wholly intentional and indicative of the film as a whole.

Per IMDb, The Apprentice is less a story entirely about Trump and more about the relationship he had with Roy Cohn, who played a major role in putting Trump on the path that he’s been on for decades now. And what is the path of Trump if not one that relies on being uncannily detached not just from the people you interact with, but from yourself as well?

Look at how Stan sells the underlying confusion that Trump has about his current position, and how Strong’s Cohn mechanically reacts to and pushes Trump towards certain phrases and behaviors (the jagged facepalm with just the tips of his fingers is a particularly scrumptious detail). This isn’t a film about Trump, this is a film about the machine that sunk its claws into Trump for the sake of its dispassionate egotism. A bullish, lifeless, unimaginative machine that took root in Trump so long ago, and is now sadly indistinguishable from the man himself.

Is the film as a whole going to be any good? We’ll just have to wait and see. Will it affect the election in any way, shape, form, or fashion? Ditto. All we know for sure is that Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan are going to be on the big screen together very soon, and that alone will probably be worth a trip to your local cinema come Oct. 11.