'Where's My Roy Cohn?': A portrait of pathetic man in the shadows

Roy Cohn was an objectively ugly person, both inside and out. And the new documentary, Where's My Roy Cohn?, takes great pains to say that both by frequently panning over photos of him with his dead-eyed and by featuring talking heads who stop just short of calling him the devil himself.

I will admit to having had a longtime fascination with Cohn. First off, I'm a history buff and have also always been fascinated by the post-World War II American political climate, where fervent anti-communism led to some of the most tragic national and geopolitical decision-making.

Cohn was the mythic dark heart of that era -- both as a political powerbroker and as a corrupt legal mind. He was undeniably brilliant, strangely charismatic and one of the cruelest hypocrites in modern public American life.

He's returned to prominence recently as his once close personal friendship with one Donald J. Trump has re-entered the public consciousness. The film gets its title from an infamous quote Trump is said to have uttered in frustration, when his self-appointed Cabinet members refused to commit crimes on his behalf. The thinking went, Cohn would have.

And the film underlines again and again, sometimes comically, just how venal Cohn was and flagrant he was about breaking the rules to get his way. There are some underpinnings about being the product of an unhappy arranged marriage and living his entire life as a self-hating closeted gay man.

But, you don't leave this movie feeling sympathy for Cohn. In fact, he comes across as rather pathetic, especially towards the end of his life where he desperately tries to convince 60 Minutes' Mike Wallace that he isn't dying of AIDS and isn't gay, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

He also seems a little pitiful when boasting about his friendship with Trump, who would characteristically abandon Cohn once his AIDS diagnosis when public (and shortly after the attorney was disbarred for decades of misconduct).

In a way, his pupil became the master. Like Cohn, Trump never admits fault, brags about breaking the rules and thrives on media manipulation.

It almost doesn't matter that Trump had one tenth the intellect that Cohn had, he clearly saw that this was a man who like him had a knack for stealing focus even if he was also objectionable on almost every human level.

And while Where's My Roy Cohn? doesn't do anything to reinvent the form, it is engrossing. It plunges deeper into some of Cohn's most infamous chapters, including his involvement with Joseph McCarthy and his representation of mafia crime bosses like John Gotti.

Cohn himself, who clearly loved to bluster about his own power, ironically admits towards the end of his life that he would never truly escape McCarthy's shadow and he was right, his obit calls out his treacherous role in the witch hunts of the 1950s. And now, he's only being resurrected again because of his association with Trump.

That's not a very enviable epitaph for a man who fancied himself a historic powerbroker.

I could help but think and hope, as I watched his benefactor -- McCarthy -- reduced to silence with that legendary, withering 'have you no sense of decency?' retort, that Trump will one day meet some form of the same fate, that his name and Trumpism, will achieve a kind of infamy that can't be redeemed. Here's hoping. Because I don't want to live in a world influenced by Roy Cohn and you shouldn't want to either.