Saturday Night review: A Saturday Night Live origin story that plays it too safe

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Gabriel LaBelle is one of the only actors in the giant ensemble cast of Saturday Night who isn’t doing a showy impersonation of the real person he’s playing. Which is funny, because the real person he’s playing is Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live, inspiration for Dr. Evil, a man who has probably been mimicked by every comedian he’s hired and every one he hasn’t over the last 50 years. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but something tells us that this small-screen kingmaker will be more flattered by the rather hagiographic portrait of him offered by Jason Reitman’s new movie, a ticking-clock dramatization of what happened behind the scenes of the very first episode of SNL.

LaBelle, who previously starred in The Fabelmans as a fictionalized proxy for the teenage Steven Spielberg (another giant of the entertainment industry who rose to prominence in 1975 at roughly the age of 30), has been cast as a young, very stressed Lorne Michaels, straining to bring his future sketch-comedy institution to air while contending with various eleventh-hour complications. The hook of Saturday Night, which is essentially an origin story of the show, is that it takes place entirely over the 90 minutes leading up to that live broadcast premiere. It’s an irresistible premise, though the fact that the movie runs a full 109 minutes should give you a sense of how loosely Reitman adheres to his real-time gimmick.

Over the course of that hour and a half, Michaels barely stops moving. He’s like Michael Keaton in Birdman, without the jabbering alter ego but with the inflated sense of self-importance and the accompanying, percussive soundtrack ticking endlessly away, a constant reminder of a looming deadline. The set isn’t finished. The running order of sketches has bloated to three hours. And there are a lot of big egos to manage — the clashing personalities of The Not Ready For Prime Time Players, embodied by a huge roll call of young stars playing ’70s dress up.

The impressions, which range from serviceable to uncanny, are arguably the real draw of Saturday Night, just as they’ve often been the draw of Saturday Night Live. Matthew Rhys doesn’t look or sound that much like George Carlin, the first host of SNL, but he gets the stand-up’s cantankerous spirit down cold. Conversely, if you closed your eyes, you might mistake Nicholas Podany’s take on an up-and-coming Billy Crystal for archival audio. Cory Michael Smith absolutely nails the peevish arrogance of Chevy Chase, before doing some impeccable Chasian shtick during a preview of the first Weekend Update. Ella Hunt nicely channels the sweet, loopy charm of Gilda Radner. Dylan O’Brien simply becomes Dan Aykroyd. 

Reitman is doing something of an impression himself. Saturday Night is basically his version of an Aaron Sorkin movie, retelling a significant chapter in showbiz history through walk-and-talk theater, elaborate Steadicam shots down the halls of Studio 8H, and a lot of pithy, ricocheting insults. A real Sorkin movie would be wittier, though not necessarily less worshipful. (Remember, the guy already put his own respectful spin on the legacy of SNL with his short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.) For Reitman, the milieu seems like another chance to commune with his late father’s work: Having already made a legacy sequel to Ghostbusters, he’s now throwing a spotlight on the elder Reitman’s whole comic generation, and celebrating the salad days of the funnymen who starred in his dad’s movies.

Saturday Night buys heavily into the mythologized image of early SNL as an incubator for daring iconoclasts. The movie keeps arranging miniature National Lampoon slobs-versus-snobs showdowns, as when head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) makes showboating sport of a prudish NBC censor (Catherine Curtin). Naysaying foils — like an exec (Willem Dafoe) threatening to cut to a Johnny Carson rerun if they can’t get their act together in time — are introduced only to be thwarted. One victim of the rampant mischief is Jim Henson, presented as a sensitive dork displeased with both the material written for his beloved Muppets and the naughty positions the cast puts them in. (Henson is played by Succession’s Nicholas Braun, who does double duty as Andy Kaufman — an eccentric casting choice that reflects the multi-role versatility of SNL players in general and the prankish identity games of Kaufman more specifically.)

It isn’t all boys-club tomfoolery. Reitman spares some stray affection for the bond of solidarity shared by SNL’s pioneering female headliners: Radner, Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), who commiserates with Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation) about their fears of being tokenized in a heavily white and male comedy troupe. There’s also Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, the veteran writer who was married to Michaels at the time, carrying on a casual side fling with Aykroyd, and highly valued for her ability to slip past the defense mechanisms of pigheaded prima donna comics, like a sulking John Belushi (Matt Wood), who refuses to sign his contract. If Saturday Night flirts heavily with the fawning admiration of a Great Man biopic, Shuster is the proverbial greater woman standing behind Michaels and keeping his ship afloat.

Much of this should function just fine as fan service for lapsed or loyal SNL heads, like the comedy-nerd version of a Marvel movie packed with surprise cameos and applause lines. Reitman, who co-wrote the script with Gil Kenan, draws on a treasure trove of trivia and lore, embellishing juicy anecdotes from Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s oral history Live From New York. He also shoots the movie on sumptuous celluloid, enhancing the bright, sometimes squalid beauty of the city looming outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza — the New York nightlife whose spirit Michaels hopes to bottle for a TV audience, which is the best answer he can muster when asked exactly what his fledgling sketch show wants to be.

The ironic failing of the movie is how it cleans up all of the chaos of that fateful night in October of ’75. If the larger structure sometimes echoes an episode of Saturday Night Live itself, there’s something much tidier about the way Reitman pulls together the various dangling threads of his multi-character tapestry. Everyone here gets a neat little arc — even haranguing, product-pushing producer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, a Hollywood scion just like Reitman). Worse, Saturday Night can’t resist winking at the audience’s privileged hindsight, having hostile showbiz legend Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) vindictively predict the entire course of Chase’s career, while a wholly fabricated last-minute field trip to the 30 Rock ice rink finds Radner wistfully looking forward to a middle age we know she’ll never see. 

Reitman keeps insisting that Saturday Night Live was a revolutionary shock to the system, a show so much more out there and alive than anything on TV at the time. So why does his movie end up feeling so safe, its anarchy so contained? Arriving just in time for the 50th anniversary of SNL, this is less a warts-and-all chronicle of the show’s messy creative genesis than a lionization of its chief mastermind, adoringly depicted as the trailblazing, career-making Grand Poobah of American comedy. At one point in Saturday Night, LaBelle’s Lorne earnestly compares himself to Thomas Edison. It’s like the punchline to a joke Reitman is too reverent to tell.

Saturday Night is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.