Nathan Weinbender reviews "Saturday Night"

NATHAN WEINBENDER:

Not all cultural institutions come into the world fully formed, and Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night is here to remind us that the 50-year staple that is Saturday Night Live was once a scrappy upstart. This is a period piece, a screwball comedy, a backstage ensemble and a ticking-clock movie, dramatizing the supposedly tumultuous 90 minutes before the first episode of SNL, then called Saturday Night, hit NBC’s airwaves on October 11, 1975.

Shot in a breathless, percussive walk-and-talk style, Reitman’s film follows SNL creator Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle from The Fabelmans) as he pinballs around 30 Rockefeller Plaza putting out all sorts of fires—some literal, most figurative.

The movie, which plays out in real time, shows us all the possible pitfalls of live TV in microcosm. Stage lights come crashing to the floor. The sound system goes kaput. The set hasn’t been finished. The actors quit.

The Not Ready for Primetime Players are in various states of distress, conflict and delusion (as well as being on various drugs). John Belushi broods, refusing to sign his NBC contract. Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd are doing pratfalls and character bits even when they’re not on camera. The women—Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman—are concerned the show will sideline them. (The movie does, too.) Meanwhile, NBC programmer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman from Licorice Pizza) is trying to placate both the restless creatives and the skeptical network suits.

That’s really the central tension of the movie, repeated over and over again: the industry vets are oblivious to the promise of what’s in front of them. The more seasoned crew members don’t take these young hipsters seriously, and they’re constantly saying things like, “No one will ever watch this show!” and “One day, you will be forgotten!” One of them is Johnny Carson’s producer David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), ready at a moment’s notice to cancel the show and air a Tonight Show rerun instead.

Of course, these moments are for our benefit, because we have the hindsight to know that SNL will become a juggernaut. The movie hits a lot of tired biopic beats like that, including hilariously implausible fabrications designed to generate false suspense and moments where characters talk about things as if they know how historically important they are. Its ending feels like the showbiz equivalent of a slow clap in an underdog sports movie.

Some of the casting is inspired, and a few of the actors meet the challenge of convincingly embodying comedians whose styles are so familiar to us. Some standouts include the effortless Rachel Sennott as pioneering SNL writer and Lorne Michaels’s longtime partner Rosie Shuster, and the terrific Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris (no relation), who is rightfully concerned he’s being relegated to the role of token Black performer.

It doesn’t all work. Labelle and Hoffman, who are in their early 20s and playing guys pushing 30, feel like high school kids playing 1970s dress-up. The Hollywood ringers playing more notable figures—Matthew Rhys as Carlin, Jon Batiste as musical guest Billy Preston, J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle—are distracting and unconvincing, almost like bad impersonations in an SNL sketch.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s the point. In fact, the movie itself is not unlike an average episode of Saturday Night Live: some of it is inspired, some of it doesn’t work at all, and it’s sort of endearing in spite of itself.

For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Nathan Weinbender.

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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.