The Apprentice, a film about the former U.S. president Donald Trump in the 1980s, recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Following its screening on Monday, Trump’s reelection campaign called the movie “pure fiction” and vowed legal action. Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that the team will be filing a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”

Donald Trump's team reacts to The Apprentice

The Apprentice stars Sebastian Stan as Trump. The central relationship of the movie is between Trump and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the defence attorney who was the chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s Senate investigations of suspected communists.

“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” Cheung said. When asked about the Trump campaign’s statement, director Ali Abbasi told the reporters at Cannes: “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?”

But the Iranian-Danish director also struck a less combative tone as he discussed the film at its festival press conference. He offered to screen The Apprentice for Trump and talk it over. “I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike,” said Abbasi. “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think he would be surprised, you know? And like I’ve said before, I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening and have a chat afterwards if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign.”

What is The Apprentice about?

In the film, Cohn is depicted as a longtime mentor to Trump, coaching him in the ruthlessness of New York City politics and business. Early on, Cohn aided the Trump Organization when it was being sued by the federal government for racial discrimination in housing.

The Apprentice, which is labelled as inspired by true events, portrays Trump’s dealings with Cohn as a Faustian bargain that guided his rise as a businessman and, later, as a politician. Stan’s Trump is initially a more naive real estate striver, soon transformed by Cohn’s education.

The film notably contains a scene depicting Trump raping his wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova ). In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce deposition, she stated that Trump raped her. Trump denied the allegation and Ivana Trump later said she didn’t mean it literally, but rather that she had felt violated. That scene and others make The Apprentice a potentially explosive big-screen drama in the midst of the U.S. presidential election. The film is for sale in Cannes, so it doesn’t yet have a release date.