It's A Live: SATURDAY NIGHT

I suppose it’s fitting that a movie set behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live’s first episode is only fitfully funny, but coasts along on a combination of high spirits, energetic impersonations, and its musical guest. That’s the typical SNL experience. Is there a television program with a bigger disparity between its cultural importance and its actual potential week-to-week quality? Nonetheless, the sheer number of talented performers and writers who’ve cycled through the show over the course of 50 seasons is staggering, and the hit-and-miss quality is nonetheless an essential part of the appeal. It puts the variety in variety show, turning up occasional fun even long past its semi-countercultural origins. What other show can go whole episodes, or seasons, or decades, in decline and still have people wondering what they’ll do next? With Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, the movie is primarily interested in that creative chaos that somehow, inevitably, makes it on air. He gets a little extra charge of dramatic tension by setting it on the show’s first night. Will it even get on the air, in its amorphous, evolving form where no one quite knows what it’ll even be or become, when the actors and executives are nervous, before it’s codified and corporatized into cultural expectations? That we know it does saps the movie of some of that charge, but he makes up for it by letting his events—heightened extrapolations of real showbiz lore—play out in real time. It’s a flurry of activity as producer and co-creator Lorne Michaels races from room to room—a pretty convincing recreation of the famous studio—as creatives of all departments clash and scurry as the ticking clock of showtime draws nearer.

In each scene we are met with broad performances of recognizable figures, as if to suggest in a fan’s shorthand that they’re just as much cartoons off screen as on. With an Andy Kaufman, the unknowability could be a point; with a Belushi or Chase or Aykroyd or Henson (or or or…) they’re just a flavoring in a large dish. They're all energetic and amused performances, even though no one gets to be characterized beyond a little shtick and a few tics, each member just one fluttering piece of a larger swirling ensemble juggled and scrambled in a frenzy right up until the show must go on. (I wondered what someone unfamiliar with SNL would make of all this unexplained commotion.) It’s all of a piece with Reitman’s typical approach to faking verisimilitude. His films’ ideas of reality are often communicated through movie language more than reality itself. Here he gives the proceedings a kind of studied glossy shagginess that uses shaky-cam, high-grain, whip-pan, roaming camerawork to sell energy and excitement and reality, even as its cast bites into thinly written characters with performative gusto. It’s all smiling recognition and tickling good intentions, bathed in hindsight. Meanwhile a jazzy Jon Batiste score chugs along in bits and riffs until blasting into a screaming-sax impersonation of the show’s theme song after the film’s predictable final line. Reitman’s superficial vision doesn’t ultimately claim to understand the people involved or the show’s place in culture—there’s the classic oral history co-written by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales for that—but makes up for it in pleasant tone. The let’s-put-on-a-show momentum keep things brisk and amiable and the inevitable triumphant climax sends it out on a high note.