Controversial Trump film The Apprentice to release before 2024 election

A movie chronicling parts of former President Donald Trump's life, The Apprentice, has found a distributor and is set to release in theaters on Oct. 11.

The movie previously struggled to garner interest at the Cannes Film Festival despite its well-known star, Sebastian Stan, who is playing a young Trump. Now audiences will see the film just under a month before Election Day.

Briarcliff Entertainment is distributing the film and also distributed filmmaker Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 2018 film, which chronicled a large part of the 2016 presidential election and Trump's presidency. Moore compares Trump's rise to the presidency to Hitler's rise to power in Nazi Germany.

Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign's communications director, told ABC News that the film's release “election interference by Hollywood elites right before November.”

“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire," he said.

The movie drew the ire of the Trump campaign in part because it depicts Trump raping then-wife Ivana, who is played by Borat sequel actress Maria Bakalova. In Ivana Trump's 1990 divorce deposition, she alleged that Donald Trump raped her, though he denied it and she later restated that she felt violated.

Danish Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi expressed his frustration in the past that the film had trouble finding a distributor. “Its not a sequel nor is it a remake,” wrote Abbasi. “Its called The Apprentice and for some reason certain power people in your country don’t want you to see it!!!”

But he still thinks Donald Trump would want to see it.

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“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,” Abbasi said in May.

In addition to Baklova and Stan, Succession star Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn, a lawyer who represented Donald Trump and who was Sen. Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the so-called Red Scare of the early 1950s.