Fifty years later, Saturday Night Live is still among the craziest sets on TV. Nothing compares to the show’s infancy, though, when everybody was flying blind. Jason Reitman’s film dramatizes the ninety minutes leading up to the show’s first taping. Although Saturday Night clocks in at 109 minutes, it flies by faster than any other film this year. The movie is like a drug-fueled machine with a hundred different pieces moving a mile a minute and at any given second, it could all collapse. There’s no room to relax, yet Saturday Night says more about the Not Ready for Prime Time Players than most biopics get across in three hours.
Gabriel LaBelle hasn’t even turned 25, but he’s already portrayed a thinly veiled version of Steven Spielberg and now a young Lorne Michaels. The real Michaels was in his early 30s when Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) approached him about creating a Saturday night program as an alternative to airing Tonight Show reruns. Michaels is portrayed as talented yet inexperienced. The same can be said about the SNL cast. He finds himself leading a ragtag group of young comedians. Some are just happy to be there. Others are on the verge of storming off. As Michaels wrangles his team together, the censors and network executives breathe down his neck, confident this experiment won’t make it past one episode.
Biopics typically cast household names to play household names. More often than not, this makes it harder for the audience to buy into the illusion. Saturday Night wisely doesn’t populate its cast with familiar faces, aside from Willem Dafoe as David Tebet and J. K. Simmons as Milton Berle. Most of the cast is comprised of young character actors who you might not recognize at first. Looking up their IMDb pages, though, you’ll quickly realize where you’ve seen each of them before. Everyone blends into their roles so well that some viewers might not realize Nicholas Braun plays Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson. It’s a testament to the subtle makeup and hair styling, not to mention John Papsidera’s casting.
Many actors are only given a handful of moments onscreen, but nobody feels underdeveloped. In a short amount of time, we get an understanding of who everyone is. Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) knows he’s destined for superstardom, but his ego is too big for his own good. John Belushi (Matt Wood) is a wild card, which is his best and worst quality. Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) is a social butterfly whose time in the spotlight would sadly be short-lived. Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) is a gifted performer, although most of his gifts will go unnoticed. The names keep coming with Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), and host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys). Beyond the cast, the film highlights unsung heroes like Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), whose relationship with Michaels is more professional than romantic, despite being married.
Many reviews will compare Saturday Night to Birdman, although it may have more similarities with 1917. Studio 8H is like a warzone as Michaels puts one fire after another, having to let a few just burn. The screenplay by Gil Kenan and Reitman captures the behind-the-scenes chaos, as well as the camaraderie. Reitman’s direction also nails an era of comedy defined by irreverence, counterculture, and experimentation with nobody caring if they get canceled. Being funny is all that matters.
Saturday Night is indeed funny and thrilling, even if the finale gets a little too sentimental. While the film doesn’t go full Studio 60, it does amount to Michaels getting on a soapbox, proclaiming why this ticking time bomb of a show could be revolutionary. In a film that otherwise maintains a scrappy, cynical grit that stays true to its inspiration, this sequence feels more like something out of a conventional biopic. Fortunately, the film has built up plenty of goodwill by this point, and the ending doesn’t drag things out. Like Michaels, Reitman is given a tall order and miraculously pulls this juggling act off. It’d be interesting to see Reitman revisit SNL in a sequel, perhaps chronicling the Steven Seagal episode. As a standalone film, Saturday Night takes us back to a point in time when nobody realized they were making history.