There are three rules for success in life: attack, attack, attack. Admit nothing, deny everything. And always claim victory.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump still stands there today.

The original advice is given to a young Trump by famed New York lawyer Roy Cohn in a controversial new biopic opening this weekend in cinemas across the United States, with just over three weeks to go. election day.

The film’s release comes as an unwelcome October surprise for the Trump campaign. He’s just the latest former American leader to fall foul of the big-screen incarnation.

Dan Snyder, a close billionaire friend of the former president, initially helped finance the film’s production in hopes that it would portray Trump in a positive light.

After seeing a completed version, he spoke to his lawyers to try to stop its distribution.

Trump’s own legal team issued a cease and desist notice to stop the “marketing, distribution and publication” of the film.

They didn’t succeed.

The Apprentice had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

It successfully premiered in New York last week in Manhattan after setting up a Kickstarter fundraiser to help “promote and defend the acclaimed Trump biopic that corporate America is afraid to show you.”

It is now sold in the United States and Europe. It is released in the UK on October 18.

The film’s producers insist that it is a “fair and balanced portrait of the former president”, based on facts, as stated at the beginning of the film.

It opens without comment, showing archival footage of Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook” speech and his assertion that he never personally profited from his public office. The implicit comparison with Trump is unavoidable.

The film covers “Donnie” as he starts out in his father’s real estate business in the 1970s and 1980s – before his political career and stint as star of the long-running reality TV show The Apprentice.

It ends with Trump ordering his 1987 bestseller, The Art Of The Deal, from the ghostwriter and undergoing surgery for liposuction and baldness.

The portrait of the future president is intimate. Sebastian Stan brilliantly imitates many gestures and mannerisms that have become familiar to global audiences.

Trump begins as a gentle, privileged and very ambitious young man.

He is shown becoming a party to blackmail, corruption, attempts to defraud his siblings, and bankruptcy.

In one graphic scene, he rapes his first wife.

In her legal declaration of divorce, Ivana actually accused her husband of spousal rape.

She recanted her claims years later, insisting: “Donald and I are the best of friends and he would never rape me.”

Ivana, the mother of Don Jnr, Ivanka and Eric Trump, died in 2022.

In this film, Trump is the apprentice trained in corruption by Roy Cohn to win. Cohn convinces him that there is no “truth”, only what you say.

Cohn was a well-known New York lawyer whose clients ranged from Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Andy Warhol to mob bosses.

Since his death in 1986, he has achieved almost legendary status in American literature as an evil manipulator.

Cohn – a closeted homosexual who died of AIDS – is a central character in the award-winning drama Angels In America and other works of fiction and non-fiction.

Cohn began his career as a fierce anti-communist prosecutor and worked alongside Richard Nixon and U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy, who led the discredited anti-communist witch hunt of the early 1950s.

Cohn used all means to have Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel, mother of two young children, turned to the electric chair for espionage.

At The Apprentice after-party in Manhattan, Jeremy Strong told Vanity Fair: “Roy’s legacy is one of shamelessness, lies, lies, cover-ups, brutality and winning as only moral measure.”

Strong is a method actor, better known as Kendall Roy in successionwho likes to inhabit the roles he plays.

In Roy Cohn, he said he also found “a kind of naive innocence and charm at the same time as he was a deadly, brutal, ruthless, savage, unforgiving person.”

By the end of the film, Cohn is almost a pathetic character when Trump rejects him, partly out of fear of his illness, partly because of his advice to “slow down” by making increasingly questionable “deals.”

Trump relents and throws one last birthday party for Cohn at Mar-a-Lago, ruined by a completely alienated Ivana who tells him that the “solid gold” and diamond Trump cufflinks he received are fakes cheap.

Meanwhile, the real estate mogul completes his apprenticeship by stealing Cohn’s rules and making them his own for his book.

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Jeremy Strong, Sebastian Stan and Maria Bakalova turn in Oscar-worthy performances – although the Academy may not be in the mood to honor the film next spring if the man himself is re-elected to the House White.

Whether friendly or hostile, presidential biopics generally don’t work very well.

Neither Primary Colors in 1998 nor Reagan this year recouped their production costs.

Primary Colors appeared well into Bill Clinton’s second term, too late to harm his political career.

John Travolta’s portrayal of the slippery Jack Stanton, a thinly disguised version of Clinton, and his “bimbo outbursts” did little for the president’s long-term reputation.

Dennis Quaid played President Ronald Reagan in a hagiography earlier this year.

It fizzled at the box office, was panned by critics, and quickly pulled from theaters. It was not released in the UK.

Reagan died 20 years ago, but Facebook further restricted online advertising of the film this year in case it was considered election interference for Republicans.

The most successful recent biopic is the satire Vice in which Christian Bale accumulates prosthetic pounds to pass himself off as Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s vice-president.

This year, the real Dick Cheney, a staunch Republican who also served Nixon, supported the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris on the candidate of his own party.

His daughter, former U.S. Congresswoman Liz Cheney, is leading the campaign against him within the party.

Unlike those films, The Apprentice is released online just as Americans are deciding whether or not to vote for Trump.

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The impact this will have is uncertain. One spectator at the US premiere thought it might help Trump win because “Sebastian Stan is attractive.”

The film’s Iranian-Danish director, Ali Abbassi, says “it’s fun to ride on the back of the dragon.”

Screenwriter Gabriel Sherman hopes the film “will force people to sit in a quiet, dark theater and watch with their own eyes the behavior of the man we could elect to be the next president.”

Donald Trump might hate the movie and denounce it. But the boastful mega-egoist so painstakingly captured in The Apprentice will nonetheless be upset, one suspects, if he fails to do “big” business at the box office.