Saturday Night

Saturday Night would make for a very solid double-bill with a Muppets movie. And not just because there are Muppets in it — well, primitive Muppets, at least, in the form of early Jim Henson creations King Ploobis and Vazh. Because much like one of Kermit and co’s capers, it’s all about putting on a show, and how much stress, anxiety and arm-flapping goes into playing music and lighting lights. At the centre of Jason Reitman’s movie, essentially playing the role of the frog, is the cardigan-wearing Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), young Canadian TV producer and wannabe revolutionary of the medium. He’s the sensible one. Around him swirls chaos, in many forms. There’s even an Animal stand-in, in the burly shape of John Belushi (Matt Wood), cocaine appreciator and walking tornado.

This is, however, far from family viewing. NBC’s sketch-comedy series Saturday Night Live (known for its first two seasons as Saturday Night) aired at midnight New York time, setting out to be edgy adult entertainment unlike anything else on the box. In their recounting of the story behind the now 50-year-old TV show’s first ever episode, perilously filmed live, Reitman leans into the R-rated mayhem. “I would rather butt-fuck cancer than make these changes,” says head writer Michael O’Donoghue, a famously acerbic figure in comedy history, superbly captured by Tommy Dewey. Legendary vaudevillian Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), aka ‘Uncle Miltie’, shows up and flashes his equally legendary (size-wise) penis. LSD is consumed — specifically, according to Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), “a sacred strain from the Isan plateau of Thailand”. There is screaming. There is fire. There is blood, 28 gallons of the stuff, albeit fake plasma made for a gag.

Think Uncut Gems with comics.

It’s a lot. And for the most part, it’s very entertaining, if stressful: think Uncut Gems with comics, or an East Coast The Player, the camera perpetually bustling down corridors, capturing snatches of disorder. The freneticism does, though, begin to feel a little one-note. Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan pile on the anarchy, but given so much of what they show didn’t actually happen on 11 October (there was no lighting rig crashing to the ground, no Uncle Miltie, no angry phone call from talk-show titan Johnny Carson), it feels like they could have eased back on the chaos and given more space to the things that actually happened, the people who were there.

Some of the players punch through even with their limited screentime: O’Brien is terrific as the data-spewing (and, at the time, unlikely 30 Rock sex symbol) Aykroyd, while it’s a good time to be a Garrett Morris fan, with the SNL troupe-member (Lamorne Morris) given more attention here than he was on the actual show. But others are somewhat lost in the din. The late Gilda Radner may have gotten her own documentary a few years back, but Ella Hunt doesn’t manage to make much impact playing the effervescent comedian. Nor do Emily Fairn or Kim Matula as the other female troupe-members, Laraine Newman and Jane Curtin. And Willem Dafoe’s sinister “head of talent” feels like an unnecessary addition, a personification of the studio suits who were watching Michaels like hawks, working out whether to boost or destroy him.

The storytelling is broad. Crew members are in disbelief that these young upstarts can pull off a show at all, let alone one that will still be airing half a century later; executives are universally malicious; the SNL cast are whirling dervishes of creativity. Saturday Night doesn’t really get under the skin of anyone, with the exception of a touching subplot about Michaels and his writer wife Rosie Schuster (Rachel Sennott). It doesn’t have time to. But while it would have been nice to have gotten more into the nitty-gritty of how this miracle of a show operated, the specific solutions to some of the million small problems that arise, that’s not this movie. This is a party picture, the kind of crowd-pleaser you’d expect with a title like Saturday Night. There’s no opportunity for deep character analysis, not while Belushi is AWOL and a llama’s just turned up.

It’s hagiographic, sure — Reitman revering 90 minutes of (let’s be honest, pretty dated) TV comedy as if it’s the Sistine Chapel — but what he’s really doing here is saluting a spirit. A freewheeling, anything-goes brand of comedy that has virtually vanished in Hollywood since the real-life equivalents of Dafoe’s character took over. Nowadays, it’s rare for a band of entertainers to get their vision on screen undiluted, bee-suits and all. So it’s a treat to be reminded of a time when they could.