Slight “Saturday Night” Delivers Fun

Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024) 3½ out of 5 stars

NBC’s long-running sketch-comedy show Saturday Night Live debuted on October 11, 1975, as just “Saturday Night.” Since then, the weekly broadcast has been a mainstay of cultural discourse, with various of the rotating casts more popular and successful than others. Created by Lorne Michaels—who remains as showrunner today—it featured an original ensemble of subsequently well-known performers, including Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, and Gilda Radner. In the new film Saturday Night, director Jason Reitman (The Front Runner) presents the leadup up to the first program. It’s a story filled with wild humor, manic disarray, and looming disaster. The result is a genuinely fun, if slight, comic caper.

We start at 10pm, with the premiere just 90 minutes away (though the actual movie lasts 109 minutes). Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle, The Fabelmans) bursts onto the street from the upstairs studio, anxious about the arrival of one of his supporting stars, Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun, Cat Person, who also plays Muppeteer Jim Henson, in a bit of stunt casting). He has many more problems than late performers, as it turns out, however.

The plan for the evening is a mess. The dress rehearsal was 3 hours long (for a 90-minute event) and nobody can decide what stays and what goes. The NBC executives are on the verge of pulling the plug and re-running a previous episode of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, instead. And some members of the cast are in near revolt over their parts (or lack thereof).

Michaels can at least count on the support of his wife and work partner Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott, Bottoms), even though they have an open marriage and she might just go home with Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien, Flashback) that night. His producer, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, Licorice Pizza), is less of a help, getting increasingly cold feet as the start time nears. To Ebersol, Carson seems a more and more attractive option.

Meanwhile, the actors engage in periodic run-throughs, at least they do when not asked to schmooze with visiting station owners from across the U.S., at the behest of NBC honcho Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe, Poor Things). Chase (Cory Michael Smith, Call Jane) is especially adept at the charm game, a skill that will serve him well in the immediate future, if not in the long haul. To Tebet and Michaels, he is a rock compared to the temperamental Belushi (Matt Wood, Sunset Park) or the deeply unhappy Morris (Lamorne Morris, Night Shift, no relation to the actor he plays), who wonders what he is doing there beyond conforming to racist stereotypes (a very appropriate question).

Little by little, zero hour approaches. Though there is plenty of tension in the air, we know how it will end: the show will go on. Watching the shenanigans proves very entertaining, though the women—beyond Sennott’s Shuster—get short shrift. Ultimately, Saturday Night may be nothing more than an engaging reenactment of a cultural touchstone’s humble beginnings, without much resonance beyond its runtime, but it’s still one hell of a wild and laugh-out-loud ride.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.