As an NBC page stands outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, striving to attract passersby to the inaugural show of Saturday Night, inside, the producer and creator, Lorne Michaels, is frantically trying to maintain composure. He has to wrangle his cast, reassure anxious studio executives, and battle to condense a three-hour show into just ninety minutes.
Director Jason Reitman sets a frenetic pace from the get-go, enhanced by impressive camera work that fluidly navigates between the cast and crew. The lens follows Michaels throughout Studio 8H as everything that could possibly go wrong inevitably does. Its staging is almost claustrophobic, perfectly capturing how chaotic things can get behind the scenes.
As an audience, we know everything works out, and Saturday Night (later to become Saturday Night Live) goes on to become a cultural touchstone, but the film does a fantastic job of keeping us on the edge of our seats anyway, holding our breath as the minutes tick down to showtime, when a cynical network exec, David Tebet, played by an intimidating Willem Dafoe, has the final say if the show will go live, or if NBC will opt for a rerun of the popular Late Night with Johnny Carson.
The movie’s true strength lies in its ensemble. As the original cast of Saturday Night Live was full of comedic unknowns, designated the Not Ready for Primetime Players, Reitman rightly opted for a largely unknown cast to fill the roles of now iconic comedians, including Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Andy Kauffman (Nicholas Braun, who also plays soft-spoken Muppeteer Jim Henson), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), and John Belushi (Matt Wood).
The performances are delightful to watch, more or less avoiding the easy trap of simple impersonation. Dylan O’Brien nails Day Aykroyd’s playful, fast-talking humor. Cory Michal Smith slips seamlessly into Chevy’s smooth-talking arrogance, and Matt Wood’s Belushi is a mercurial talent who may end up derailing the entire show if it doesn’t sign his contract.
Another bright spot is Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris (no relation), a Julliard graduate and the only person of color in the cast – he spends the movie doubting his presence, asking those around him why he’s even there. Everyone knows why he’s there, but no one wants to say it. One of the movie’s highlights is when Morris sings Kill All the Whiteys for a sound check. Brilliant.
I would be remiss not to give Gabriel LaBelle his due as a young, tenacious Lorne Michaels. He’s determined to get Saturday Night to air, and while he outwardly keeps his cool, we can still see Lorne’s internal panic expressed in LaBelle’s eyes. In the future, Lorne Michaels will be described as “a psychological terrorist” by the people who worked with him. But that day is not this day! This Lorne Michaels is a driven, soft-spoken dreamer, even when mass chaos envelopes him. Yet, there are flashes of the stern, somewhat cold showrunner to come when he’s faced with cutting down the airtime of two comics scheduled to appear on the show, one of whom is Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany)!
Unfortunately, I was disappointed in how the film handled the female cast members. Although the portrayals of Radner, Jane Curtain (Kim Matula), and Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn) were lovely, they’re given little screen time and essentially regulated to giggling secondary characters. These legendary ladies of Saturday Night Live deserved far better. Thankfully, Saturday Night does justice for Rosie Schuster (played by the wonderful Rachel Sennott), Michaels’s wife and writer for the show. Their marriage may not be conventional, but Rosie is the grounded strength that keeps Lorne tethered while everything around them unravels.
Saturday Night is quite clearly an embellished portrayal of that very first show, but it thrives on nostalgia and Saturday Night Live’s enduring appeal to the masses. It’s lunacy at its finest and may just be one of the year’s best movies.