‘Saturday Night’: A Star is Lorne

Saturday Night bestows reverential treatment to television’s most enduringly irreverent series, Saturday Night Live, mythologizing and sanctifying the venerated NBC institution now celebrating its golden anniversary. If a half-century’s worth of continuous—if wildly inconsistent—sketch comedy hasn’t already earned SNL a little lionization, then Jason Reitman’s fawning look back at the show’s pre-debut chaos sure does its best to secure it.

Working within the more or less real-time conceit of the last 90 minutes right before broadcasting live at 11:30pm on October 11, 1975—the show’s inaugural air date—Reitman and his co-screenwriter Gil Kenan conflate temporal reality to overstuff the manic backstage drama while crafting moments both believable and apocryphal.

SATURDAY NIGHT ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Jason Reitman 
Written by: Gil Kenan, Jason Reitman
Starring: Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan O’Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamore Harris, Kim Matula, Finn Wolfhard, Nicholas Braun, Cooper Hoffman, Tommy Dewey, Willem Dafoe, Matthew Rhys, J.K. Simmons, Jon Batiste
Running time: 109 mins

Witness temperamental talent, skeptical affiliate managers, defiant writers mocking infuriated network censors, a lighting rig that nearly crushes two cast members, the last-minute decision to assign Weekend Update’s inspired first anchor; the gushing hallway pitch for the bloody Julia Child sketch; and cocky Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) whipping out his infamous 11-inch conversation piece. All those high-anxiety encounters sure are a rush to watch, but Reitman’s chock-a-block salute stretches credulity like Laffy Taffy in front of a funhouse mirror.

“What is the show?” patiently exasperated NBC exec Dick Ebersol (Copper Hoffman) keeps asking Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle). The low-key panicked SNL producer/creator has no clear way to articulate the mayhem he’s trying to orchestrate even though it’s already 10pm and the clock is ticking. It’s a variety spectacular, a new kind of entertainment, the first show made by people who were raised on the boob tube. It could be a revolutionary counterculture show of unknown twentysomethings with no experience, or it could be a half-assed rat fuck donkey show. The only way to find out: go on air and see what happens.

That’s a risk NBC isn’t keen to take, and neither is late night Johnny Carson, whose furious voice we hear on a tense call with Michaels. “You’re a bench warmer. A stalking horse,” he sneers. Carson knows that NBC is using Michael’s whatsit spectacle as a power move in an ugly contract negotiation, daring to take the late-evening slot when the network usually plays reruns of The Tonight Show. “It’s my fucking network,” Carson fumes. ‘It’s my fucking night.” No pressure.

Meanwhile, NBC bigwig David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) haunts the studio, taking mental notes at what he half-believes might be an impending catastrophe. Head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) casually and cruelly insults any dissenters in sight, while befuddled puppeteer Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun, also pulling double duty as Andy Kaufman) keeps complaining to Michaels that no one has told him yet what he’ll be actually doing during the broadcast. And haunting the bulletin board festooned with index cards representing every part of the show—three hours’ worth—is Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany), nervous that they’re going to cut his standup routine. Which, of course, they do. 

Saturday Night is at its best when it captures that adrenaline rush of dreamy creativity smacking headlong into hard deadlines, the exquisite agony of shot-clock problem-solving and the fight-or-flight exhilaration of diving headlong into the unknown. It’s a process film at its core, and as such it’s hobbled whenever Reitman and Kenan slow down to shoehorn in yet another encounter or exchange that feels weighted with the veneer of legend. 

Lifelong fans of the show, who, like myself, loved watching that original cast back in the 1970s, will find Saturday Night irresistible as its nostalgia gambit pushes all the right buttons. The actors are winning ensemble cast, invoking those original Not Ready For Prime Time Players—Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), and Jane Curtin (Kim Matula)—with enough nuance that their mimicry never comes off as exaggerated impersonations.      

And those—like myself—who remember the off-camera geniuses like Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), Anne Beatts (Leander Suleiman) Herb Sargent (Tracy Letts) and Alan Zweibel (John Brener), along with bit players like sternly goofy announcer Don Pardo (Brian Welch) and the alt-comedy duo Franken and Davis (Taylor Grey and Mcabe Gregg), will feel even more warm and fuzzy towards the film. 

Millennials and Gen Z won’t get all the references, but they will pick up on the vibes: that scrappy sense of something new being born, of a culture-defining Zeitgeist beginning to form in all its natal potency. Like the llama, Abe Lincoln impersonator, and Vegas showgirls that perennially appear in the corridors of Studio 8H almost like a comedy crèche, Saturday Night invokes the absurd and transmogrifies it into both the sacred and the profane.