The unthinkable is a curious feeling about the late, highly notorious Roy Cohn, the merciless pitbull attorney and fixer whom some regarded as “evil incarnate.”

I felt it last month while watching Ali Abbasi‘s The Appprentice…a twinge of sympathy for Cohn…you feel just a bit sorry for the guy.

This morning I shared this emotional detour with director Matt Tyrnauer, creator of an excellent 2019 documentary about Cohn, called “Where’s My Roy Cohn?”

Here’s my five and a half year-old Sundance review.

HE to Tyrnauer: “I’m a huge fan of The Apprentice, which I saw last month on the Côte d’Azur. It’s right up your Roy Cohn alley, as you’ve no doubt read.

“The astonishing thing, for me, is that Abbasi’s film actually makes you feel a tiny bit sorry for Cohn when Sebastian Stan‘s Donald Trump more or less turns on him and essentially brushes him off after Cohn’s IRS troubles and AIDS affliction have taken their toll.

“For in so doing Trump violated a code of shady ethical conduct that was explained by William Holden’s Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch: “When you side with a man you stick with him. Otherwise you’re like some animal…you’re finished!”

“I wouldn’t have thought that generating a certain measure of sympathy for one of the 20th Century’s most loathsome men would have been possible, but The Apprentice manages this.

“There’s also a faint measure of irony in the fact that The Apprentice portrays young Trump (the narrative begins in ‘73 or thereabouts when Trump is 27) as not altogether repugnant. He’s essentially portrayed as hungry and ambitious but not yet venal or rapacious.

“Stan’s Trump performance struck me as just right — never flirting with parody, not Alec Baldwin-ish, no cheap laughs. And for my money Jeremy Strong’s Cohn performance is drop-dead brilliant. He should be Oscar nominated for it.

“Okay, there’s one cheap laugh when, early in their mentor-apprentice relationship, Cohn says to Trump, ‘You have a fat ass — you should do something about that.’

“Have you seen it? Do you have friends who’ve seen it? I’d love to hear your specific reactions, etc.

“All hail Scotty Bowers in heaven!”

Friendo: “Although I didn’t sympathize with Cohn in the last part of The Apprentice, I found him weirdly likable. That’s the paradox of Roy Cohn. He was a vicious operator but he was kind of like Tony Soprano. He’s…compelling.”

HE to friendo: “All I was saying is that there’s a code of honor, even among fuckheads. If you accept big favors and counsel from someone and thereby rise in the world, even if he’s the devil himself, you don’t throw him under the bus when he’s going through hard times. You stick with him through thick and thin.

“Like Scorsese stuck with Elia Kazan.”

My January 2019 review of Where’s My Roy Cohn?:

“How can a study of the most notoriously ruthless attack-dog attorney in U.S. history be anything but a dark poem? A movie, I’m thinking, about ghosts, demons, banshees, goblins. A merging of fact and nightmare.

“The film is actually less poetic than a smart, sturdy, well-assembled thing — an efficient portrait of a closeted, scabrous, old-school shithead. It’s a fully respectable as far as it goes, but Cohn’s legend doesn’t feel all that linked or connected in the current zeitgeist. He was raised and shaped in another era, a darker time.

“The only element that vibrates is the fact that Donald Trump admired Cohn’s fang-toothed approach back in the day. Yes, Cohn was an inspiration to the youngish Trump in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, but Trump’s hyper-aggressive approach to the rough and tumble of big-time politics, looking to exploit whatever fears and anxieties might be lying around…well, we knew that going in.

“How absorbing is Where Is My Roy Cohn? — how sharply assembled, how hard-htting? Very, but at the same time it never really sheds its skin and transforms itself into something you might not see coming. I’m sorry but I didn’t enjoy it as much as Tyrnauer’s Scotty and the Secrets of Hollywood or Studio 54 docs, both of which were released last year.

“Cohn was a cold, bloodless, out-for-numero-uno creep, and seemingly a drag to be around. As a subject, I mean, as well as in real life.

“I guess I was looking for some kind of crazier current, maybe something borrowed from the realm of Mike Nichols‘ Angels in America. The film is “good,” as far as that goes. Tyrnauer is a gifted, highly intelligent filmmaker. I have no complaints with what it is — I just wish it had unfolded in a loopier, less conventional way.”