Saturday Night

This past Sunday night, I sat alone in a small movie theater and watched this movie, depicting the 90 chaotic minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live. It's directed and co-written by Jason Reitman, the director of Juno, Up in the Air and Thank You for Smoking. His co-writer, Gil Kenan, also worked with him on Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Its cast features Gabriel LaBelle of The Fabelmans as SNL creator Lorne Michaels; Cory Michael Smith, whom I recall playing the Riddler in Gotham, as Chevy Chase; Dylan O'Brien of Teen Wolf fame as Dan Aykroyd; Ella Hunt of Anna and the Apocalypse as Gilda Radner; Rachel Sennott of TV's The Idol as Michaels' sometime wife and writer Rosie Shuster; Lamorne Morris of TV's Fargo as Garrett Morris; soap opera maven Kim Matula as Jane Curtin; Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things as a page; Nicholas Braun of Succession in a dual role as Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman; Willem Dafoe as the NBC talent executive who held the power to make or break SNL up to the moment it went on air; Matthew Rhys of the Perry Mason reboot in a very unflattering portrayal of George Carlin; J.K. Simmons in an even more unflattering portrayal of Milton Berle; Robert Wuhl as the show's director; Catherine Curtin of Orange Is the New Black as a network censor; Paul Rust of I Love You, Beth Cooper as Paul Shaffer; Brad Garrett in a throw-away role as a bad night club comedian; and lots more people in roles that might make their careers.

It's a tour de force of the kind of suspense you can't really take seriously, if you take time to think about it, because we all know that SNL went on the air and has been on the air for almost 50 years. But the movie doesn't give you much time to think about it. It's a chaotic look behind the scenes at an everything-that-can-go-wrong-does moment, focusing mainly on Michaels as he (seemingly calmly) puts out one small fire after another without ever, until the crucial moment, appearing to be in control of the general conflagration. It puts the unknown 20-somethings who became instant stars on SNL into context, without sugar-coating the quirks that made them difficult to work with. It delivers spot-on impersonations of young Billy Crystal, Gilda Radner, Andy Kaufman and more. It sometimes made my flesh crawl (cue Uncle Milty). It frequently made me laugh. There's some hard drug use in it. There's some great music in it. And there are a lot of people in it whose heads you want to knock together, many of them on the crew side of the production. It doesn't break down into a three-act structure; it just flows and evolves, building up to a tense moment followed by just the first on-air sketch of SNL. Whatever it is, and however you feel about it, it just might be a perfectly executed piece of film.

Let's head straight into Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) The Dafoe character's unexpected pep talk to encourage Michaels, early in the movie. He doesn't mean it; by the end of the movie he's singing an entirely different tune. This was a big surprise but there was also an underlying layer of menace in it, lingering in the back of your mind when, later, another producer belts Michaels across the chops with the news that the network wanted SNL to fail. (2) Michaels' answer, when he finally spits it out, to the question of what his show is. (3) Andy Kaufman's Mighty Mouse gag. Always wonderful to see, and his impersonator in this movie nails the character, dead center.