Saturday Night

A Bruce Springsteen biopic is in production, focusing on the journey leading to his Nebraska album. Somebody on a message board mentioned that if it goes all the way up to the beginning of the Born in the USA tour, they’d love to see it end with Bruce at the center microphone in front of thousands, counting in to the first song, and then cut to black. I love that idea, and director Jason Reitman employs it in Saturday Night. At an hour and 49 minutes, it’s almost exactly in real time, as it chronicles the 90 minutes leading up to the first ever broadcast of what became Saturday Night Live. The last thing we see is Chevy Chase saying “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” It ends at the beginning.

Audiences who seek to be educated may be frustrated and disappointed. It’s not a straight-up biopic. It’s constructed as a cinematic, retro, rose colored glasses account of what it might have been like that night in October 1975. The pacing is frenetic, heightened, and rat-a-tat-tat. It reminded me of three things. You could call it Birdman without the “it’s all one shot” device. There’s a play called The 1940’s Radio Hour where the majority of it is the radio broadcast, but the first part is the 10 characters hustling, bustling, moving around, working stuff out, and getting ready for the show. I also thought back to David Mamet’s State and Main, about the production of a movie. It had William H. Macy at the center of the craziness, overseeing everything and constantly putting out fires.

The Macy counterpart here is Lorne Michaels, the famous SNL producer - played by Gabriel LaBelle. I’ve heard people call him “young Steven Spielberg,” as he was teenage Sammy Fabelman in The Fabelmans. He was also in Snack Shack, which will be my favorite movie of 2024, unless something blows me away in the next 2 1/2 months. He has, by far, the most screen time here, and carries the movie. Michaels has long been imitated by former cast members, often in exaggerated ways. You know the voice Mike Myers used for Dr. Evil? That’s Lorne Michaels. LaBelle gives us just enough of the vocal affectations so we know who it’s supposed to be, without it being a caricature.

Characters are paraded on, and impeccably embodied by actors, much like how performers have been doing it on the show for 49 years. Some serious thought went into the casting, because they all BE them very well. Cory Michael Smith is a scene-stealer as Chevy Chase, akin to how we hear the real Chase must have been, for better and worse. I also particularly loved Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal, Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, and Paul Rust as future Letterman bandleader Paul Shaffer. Of the faces I recognized, we have Willem Dafoe, Tracy Letts, Finn Wolfhard, J.K. Simmons, and it’s always a pleasure to see Rachel Sennott. We never spend too much time getting to know anyone, and I wondered whether all those people were really there that night, or this was a forced attempt to cram in as many as possible. It’s all very surface-level.

There’s a bittersweetness in a pep talk Gilda Radner gives to John Belushi. When he gets cold feet about doing the show and walks out, Radner follows him and monologues for a bit about how this is going to be a monumental show, and in 20 years, they’ll both visit the set at cast reunions, and can tell their children about this experience. We know that didn’t happen for them, and some critics have dismissed this scene as maudlin, but I was affected by it. By the time it ramps up to showtime, Saturday Night had won me over enough, and I was on board with it. Don’t expect any deep explorations, or to learn anything, but as a fast-paced, fictionalized snapshot, it works.