The Trump movie too controversial for Hollywood is finally here

“I took a step back from my own opinions and projections about what I thought I knew," Stan said. Reading the script this way made him see aspects of young Trump’s story as universal. “I actually found it to be much more relatable than I thought. What this was trying to explore was: What happens to a human being in pursuit of the American dream?"

Stan’s portrayal of Trump—which viewers will find 1) humanizing 2) demonizing 3) polarizing or 4) all of the above—is just one controversial element of the movie. There’s also the timing of its release in theaters on Friday, less than a month before There’s also the timing of its release in theaters on Friday, less than a month before Election Day.

From start to finish, bringing this film to fruition has been a battle, with struggles to secure financing, delays due to the writer-and-actor strikes, studio refusals to distribute the film and a legal threat from Trump’s attorneys. It took six years and several near-derailments. The movie arrives in roughly 1,740 theaters this weekend before opening internationally later this month.

Director Ali Abbasi understands that his movie’s very existence raises thorny questions at a key moment in the tight race between former president Trump and vice president Kamala Harris. But as a filmmaker, he also feels like he’s releasing a movie about Lionel Messi right before the World Cup. He hadn’t planned for an election-season debut when he was working on the film in 2018, but now that he’s got one, he’s embracing it.

“Some people would say, ‘OK, this is too flattering, this is too good a portrait of him—aren’t you afraid people will go vote for him?’ That’s not my job. Affecting the election is not my job," said Abbasi, an Iranian-Danish filmmaker living in Copenhagen. “But of course it is important. We’re sort of riding on the back of a dragon here."

Reached this week, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung repeated an earlier statement that called the film “election interference by Hollywood elites," “malicious defamation" and “garbage" that “belongs in a dumpster fire."

The movie portrays Trump as a protégé of the contentious political operative Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, who teaches him three lessons of survival in a world full of adversaries. The first lesson: attack, attack, attack. The second: admit nothing and deny everything. The third: always claim victory.

“The Apprentice" opens with the disclaimer that it is a work of fiction. Many points in the screenplay, written by journalist Gabriel Sherman, are based on materials used in documentary research including Trump’s memoirs and interviews, biographies and legal filings.

The movie has given Hollywood massive indigestion. After a rousing reception at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring, Trump’s lawyers sent Abbasi and Sherman a cease-and-desist letter that included a warning to distributors and others in the industry of legal trouble should they back the film, according to the letter described by Sherman in a recent Vanity Fair article.

“For all this talk about Hollywood being liberal, they’re not really interested in politics," said Abbasi, whose directing credits include “Holy Spider," “Border" and “Shelley." After studio executives told him how much they liked the film, he said, they split. “You’re left out in the street."

“The Apprentice" languished as executives at every major studio and streamer passed, some without seeing the movie at all, according to Tom Ortenberg, the film’s eventual distributor at Briarcliff Entertainment. Over his career, the longtime movie executive has released films including Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11" and Tom McCarthy’s best-picture Oscar winner “Spotlight."

“I enjoy taking on pictures that others are afraid of, that others are frankly too cowardly to take on," said Ortenberg. “I would have expected a bit of a bidding war among distributors, but word was out that the major studios were running away from the picture like their hair was on fire."

One of the film’s most shocking moments involves an alleged sexual assault by Trump on his first wife, based on an accusation of rape by Ivana Trump in a legal deposition during the couple’s 1990 divorce, Sherman wrote in the magazine. She recanted the claim in a Trump biography published three years later, stating that she was speaking in a figurative sense and no actual crime was committed, and she publicly denied the assault when Trump ran for president, Sherman wrote. But Sherman and Abbasi chose to include the alleged rape in the film, believing that Ivana Trump’s original testimony delivered under oath was the truth.

The statement from Trump’s spokesman called the film’s contents “pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked."

Sherman, who covered Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for New York magazine, started writing the screenplay for “The Apprentice" in 2017 at the beginning of Trump’s presidency. He was fascinated by how soft-spoken Trump seemed in early TV interviews. “What I was blown away by was how different he was," Sherman said in an interview. “I thought, how does this person turn into the one that we see on TV every day?"

Before accepting the role of Trump, Stan asked trusted colleagues and friends whether they thought he should participate. Some loved the idea, some hated it, some simply worried about its repercussions. “There were people that were thinking that perhaps it wasn’t safe or perhaps it was going to alienate half the country or it was going to affect my career," the actor said.

Stan said he accepted the role because he wanted to better understand its central character, and the challenge seemed scary in a way that motivated him. He researched young Trump, whose speaking voice he found different from how it is now, and he got used to mouth implants and poofy blond wigs. His goal was to subvert the many pop culture versions of Trump.

“Everybody knows, you see a red tie, you know what that means, you see anything with the lips, you know what that means," said Stan. “Part of the job that I had was to figure out beforehand all of the projections, opinions and ideas and impressions and caricatures that people were walking into the theater with before the movie even started, to know what not to do in order to play against the things that people were expecting."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com