This year marks fifty years of Saturday Night Live on NBC, a live sketch comedy show that has survived dynastic political and cultural shifts, wild fluctuation in performance talent, and endless accusations of being “not funny anymore”. Whether or not you like SNL is irrelevant. Fifty years speaks for itself. In those five decades, the show has morphed from a countercultural middle finger into a corporate conglomerate’s golden child. Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night aspires to go back to the show’s edgier roots, before creator Lorne Michaels was the godfather of television comedy. Expectations for SNL was low, or so this film tells us, and before its legendary first episode, there was ninety minutes of chaos and uncertainty that would go on to define the show’s enduring legacy.

This ticking clock structure and icon-born-from-chaos theme reminded me a lot of Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, which had an Aaron Sorkin script that cared less about the nuts and bolts of an Apple computer and more about the impossible-to-parse brilliance of its title character. Like Jobs, Saturday Night hopes to similarly build the legend of Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle) as a man whose vision could simply not be visioned by anyone else. Boyle’s film is a masterpiece of aggrandizement, a whirling, funny film about how a great man is plagued by his weaknesses even while his most enduring accomplishments succeed. It’s telling that Steve Jobs is funnier than Saturday Night, a movie that seems to forget that Saturday Night Live was a property meant to provide laughs.

This is nothing new for Reitman, a director initially defined by the piercing wit of his early films only to become a for-hire rebuilder of comedy institutions. His contributions to the Ghostbusters series takes a franchise built upon dirty jokes and turns them into treacly, Spielbergian family slop. I haven’t seen his Ghostbusters movies, and Saturday Night isn’t making me rush. Son of another comedy legend, Ivan Reitman, Jason’s films had the requisite bite when they were penned by Oscar-winner Diablo Cody (Juno and Young Adult being the best examples), but that edginess is gone without her, and we’re left with a filmmaker whose films feel more comfortable in the 90s. Sure, it was great that the studios used to produce these kinds of adult dramas all the time, but Reitman’s brand is stale and unsurprising.

The ninety-minutes-to-air conceit is meant to create suspense, but a lot of the air goes out of that balloon when you realize that the minutes passing in the film don’t match the ones on your wristwatch (the movie is 109 minutes), which makes the film feel stilted. As Lorne stands in Studio 8H, his problems are metastasizing. His older production crew has no respect for his youth, his unorthodox methods, and his demands of perfection; the suits upstairs are using his show as a bargaining chip with Johnny Carson, whose reruns usually take the Saturday night slot; and his cast varies between nonverbally taciturn and clinically aloof. The show’s producer, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), is a true believer in Lorne, but as the show approaches, Dick is having a difficult time understanding what Lorne’s show is even supposed to be.

There’s a persistent fight with censors who don’t accept the show’s raunchy, countercultural bend. The head writer, Michael O’Donohue (Tommy Dewey, in a performance you won’t believe isn’t Joel McHale), is even more unbending then Lorne in his insistence on the show’s purity, and his hostility creates even more drama with corporate bosses. The episode’s host, comedian George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), is a drug-addicted rageaholic who refuses to leave his dressing room. Television luminaries like executive David Tebet (Willem Defoe) and aging superstar Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) swing by the set, first to give insincere kudos before revealing their complete lack of faith. All the while, Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) is non-plussed that writers and cast members keep leaving his muppets in compromising positions.

One of the few respites from the mayhem for Lorne is Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), his wife who is slowly transitioning from romantic partner to creative collaborator. The two are headed for splitsville, but still work together to make the show succeed. Rosie seems to have more chemistry with cast member Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), a man who also isn’t afraid to flirt with the other women of the cast, including Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt). Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation) feels out of place in the cast, first because of his age but mostly because of his race. John Belushi (Matt Wood) refuses to even sign his contract, while Chevy Chase (Corey Michael Smith) suffers from a severe case of overinflated ego that alienates everyone around him.

Lorne Michaels has succeeded in making himself the face of SNL, but for me the success of that show is really dependent on the talent of its cast. To that end, it would have been nice to see the legendary first cast get storylines of any depth. Belushi, Chase, and Morris are given facsimiles of an arc, but Curtin, Newman, and Radner are treated almost like disorderly nymphs, down for anything and completely oblivious to the anxieties around them. Aykroyd gets his moments, but Saturday Night never stops obsessing over Lorne. Will the world ever come to understand what he’s trying to create? The suspense is deadened just a bit because we know what the end result will be, and Reitman (with co-writer Gil Kenan) struggles to create alternative stakes. I’m sure Lorne Michaels met plenty of obstruction, but forcing it all into one night feels incredibly contrived and inauthentic. In other words, they’re no Aaron Sorkin.

If Saturday Night succeeds at all, it’s as a showcase for a new generation of movie stars and Oscar winners. Sennott, Smith, Morris, and Hoffman all have moments of brilliance in their performance, finding small avenues of character. Jon Baptiste gives a stirring portrait of Billy Preston, the show’s musical guest, and No Hard Feelings star Andrew Barth Feldman gets some of the film’s few laughs as Neil Levy, Lorne’s long suffering assistant. As Michaels, LaBelle feels slightly miscast. Too young, the film feels like a burden he can’t carry, and his decisions feel too actorly. His incredible performance in 2022’s The Fabelmans makes me believe in his talent, but Reitman misuses it here. The way it’s edited we can’t decide whether Lorne is blindingly confident or faking it till he makes it, and since his genius is the linchpin to everything, that’s difficult to reconcile.

Perhaps the main folly is a point I keep returning to: the movie isn’t funny. More specifically, Reitman doesn’t seem to care at all about the comedic innovation that SNL pioneered. Telling that story might force him to turn the camera away from Lorne and toward the cast, but that doesn’t fit into the script’s hackneyed legend-forged-in-fire thesis. During a scene where Lorne recites the legend of Prometheus in front of the Rockefeller Center statue, I really started to feel my eyes roll into the back of my head. When the movie recreates classic SNL sketches, the characters on screen guffaw with laughter but my audience was noticeably silent, which really says it all. Throughout the movie, Lorne is frequently making perfection be the enemy of the good. In Saturday Night, reverence brings Reitman to his knees.

 

Directed by Jason Reitman