109 min | R | October 11, 2024 | Sony Pictures
Jason Reitman makes a film about the ninety minutes before the first episode of Saturday Night Live aired. It is frantic and funny and more interested in the chaos of creation than the mythology of the show.
The date is October 11, 1975. NBC Studio 8H is a construction site. The first episode of a live comedy show called Saturday Night goes on air in ninety minutes. Nothing is ready. The sets are not built. The cast is fighting. The host does not know his lines. The network executive wants to pull the plug. Lorne Michaels has ninety minutes to hold together a show that is falling apart before it has started. Jason Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan structure the film as a real-time countdown that never stops moving. The camera follows Michaels through hallways and stairwells and dressing rooms and control booths. Every scene introduces a new crisis. Every crisis bleeds into the next one.
Gabriel LaBelle plays Lorne Michaels with a calm that borders on catatonic. He is the still center of a tornado and LaBelle makes his stillness feel like strategy rather than paralysis. Rachel Sennott plays Rosie Shuster with sharp intelligence. Cory Michael Smith plays Chevy Chase with the arrogance that made Chase both essential and unbearable. Lamorne Morris plays Garrett Morris with quiet dignity in the face of tokenism. Dylan O’Brien plays Dan Aykroyd with manic energy. Ella Hunt plays Gilda Radner with warmth. The ensemble is enormous and Reitman gives each performer enough room to establish a character without stopping the clock. J.K. Simmons plays Milton Berle with old-guard condescension. Willem Dafoe plays an NBC executive with corporate menace.
Reitman shoots on 16mm film stock that gives the production a period texture. The camera work by Eric Steelberg is handheld and restless and follows the rhythm of backstage panic. The production design recreates 1975 NBC with obsessive detail. The editing by Shane Reid maintains the real-time illusion through a structure that is more choreographed than it appears. The film moves through physical spaces with the logic of a stage play. Doors open onto new crises. Hallways connect competing storylines. The sound design layers conversations and construction noise and pre-show anxiety into a wall of organized chaos.
The film mythologizes SNL while pretending not to. Reitman frames the first episode as a revolution in American comedy and the film believes its own framing completely. That sincerity is both its strength and its limitation. The individual performances and the mechanical precision of the filmmaking overcome the hagiographic impulse. This is a backstage comedy that understands the terror and the exhilaration of making something live. Whether Saturday Night Live deserves this level of reverence is a question the film is not interested in asking.