“The Apprentice” is a movie about the early adult life of Donald Trump, but it ends with his birth.

In the film’s final scene, Trump (Sebastian Stan) is meeting with Tony Schwartz (Eoin Duffy), the writer with whom he will collaborate on “The Art of the Deal.” Trump, as the film makes clear, was a known quantity before then. But with the bestselling book, a celebrity was born.

The book, published in 1987, vaulted him from regional tabloid name to pop-culture phenomenon, portrayed in skits on “Saturday Night Live,” playing himself in sitcom and movie cameos, becoming an all-purpose media symbol of ostentatious wealth. The book helped make him a TV star — Mark Burnett, the producer of the reality-TV show “The Apprentice,” was a fan — and that stardom helped make him president.

All that, however, comes after the events of the movie “The Apprentice.” Directed by Ali Abbasi, the film focuses on how the young Trump was molded by two father figures. His actual father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), instilled the belief that a man’s highest aspiration is to be a “killer.” His moral father, the lawyer, fixer and onetime Joseph McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), taught him that life is a constant fight with three rules: Attack, attack, attack; deny, deny, deny; and never admit defeat.

But it is also about how a local real estate developer’s son evolved into the media-bestriding character we know. Cohn, whose life as a closeted gay man was famously captured in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” kept a busy social calendar and believed in the value of information and social capital, of knowing people and being seen.

To that end, the Cohn of the movie gives his young disciple a directive more consequential than any tips on beating housing discrimination lawsuits: “Keep your name in the papers.” The young Trump, not yet the media hound who lives for the camera lights, requires some teaching. In a memorable scene, he takes a phone call in Cohn’s car for an early newspaper profile, with Cohn coaching, correcting, almost puppeteering him.

We have had a lot of Donald Trumps by now. Alec Baldwin played him as a bloviating parade float on “SNL”; Brendan Gleeson made him a threatening, sharklike creature of appetite in “The Comey Rule”; Anthony Atamanuik captured his chaotic stream-of-consciousness — Leopold Bloom by way of Queens — on “The President Show.”

But we haven’t had many young Trumps. It’s striking to see Abbasi and Stan excavate this early version of their subject as Trump, now 78, shows his age on the campaign trail, going on inscrutable tangents and halting a town hall Q&A to sway to a playlist of his favorite songs, for over a half-hour.

In “The Apprentice,” he is all drive and hunger. Stan catches something of the unformed, creamy-voiced mogul-in-embryo that you can see in clips of his early interviews, affecting the air of glamour he needed to advance his aspirations beyond his father’s rough-edged outer-borough macherdom.

The portrayal is no love letter. The film depicts Trump raping his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), an accusation he has denied. (Ivana Trump accused Trump of rape in a divorce deposition but later said in a statement, “I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”) “The Apprentice” also suggests that a good portion of the go-getter personality for which Trump became famous in the 1980s came out of a pill bottle.

But would you believe it’s also sympathetic? The young Donald the movie introduces is no hero. But he’s a hustler, running his mouth and burning shoe leather to try to cut deals, work angles and persuade his father to think bigger. Whatever you think of the actual, present-day Donald Trump, this is the kind of plot dynamic that, subconsciously, puts you on a movie character’s side.

This Donald Trump is somebody who wants to be more than he is. And you can only achieve part of that goal by buying and building skyscrapers. To get really big — America big — requires owning psychic real estate. You get that through notoriety, through the tabloids and above all, through television.

Even as “The Apprentice” traces Trump’s rise, moral corruption and business overextension in the 1980s, it also follows him through his early days of media peacockery. As Trump Tower rises, and his profile with it, he dazzles the New York press and sits for an interview with Rona Barrett (Valerie O’Connor), the entertainment journalist who was among the first to intuit his star quality and ambitions.

The real-life Trump has panned the film on social media. He is known to be partial to classics such as “Sunset Boulevard,” the Billy Wilder tragicomedy about a silent-film star declining in a baroque mansion that has become a prison of her past glory. “The Apprentice” is no “Sunset Boulevard,” but it is, in a kindred way, a cautionary tale about fame.

We know what Trump will become after the credits roll. Cohn, who died of complications from AIDS in 1986, did not live to see those fruits of his labors. But he had an eye for talent, and he got a glimpse. Late in the film, an ailing Cohn visits Trump in his palatial digs at Mar-a-Lago and admires his protégé’s appearance. “You look like the fella from ‘Miami Vice,’” Cohn says.

The transformation is more than physical. Trump, “The Apprentice” shows us, was made for TV.