What Does ‘Saturday Night’ Think ‘Saturday Night Live’ Is About?

When I first heard about the premise of Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night” — the entire film takes place in the 90 minutes leading up to the late-night comedy landmark’s first episode in 1975 — I confess that I found the idea to be a head-scratcher. Sure, it seemed like there would be a backstage let’s-put-on-a-show “What can go wrong? Everything can go wrong!” real-time frenetic bustle to the thing. And that sounded like fun.

More to the point, though: The show that came to be called “Saturday Night Live” — in the first season, it was just called “Saturday Night” — didn’t come together overnight, or in 90 minutes. A universe of pitching and planning and casting and writing, along with an infinite number of decisions large and small, went into the formation of a revolutionary new television comedy spirit and form. How was “Saturday Night” created? How was it dreamed up? How did it all come together? By definition, 99 percent of all that was in the rearview mirror by the time the show made its network premiere on October 11, 1975. So how could Reitman’s movie hope to capture anything truly crucial about the show’s invention?

Now that the film has opened (in limited release), and audiences are getting to see it, “Saturday Night” stands revealed as a far more interesting movie than I suspected it would be. I was held by every minute of it. Part of that, but only part, is the sheer cosplay stunt of it. If, like me, you grew up with “Saturday Night Live” and were immersed in the early days of it, there’s an irresistible amusement to seeing everyone associated with the show turned into a dramatic character, and to checking off those who ring true and those who don’t — in other words, assessing what Reitman nailed and what he didn’t get quite right. To me, there’s a lot of both.

Here are a couple of the ones he nailed. Matt Wood, as John Belushi, is asked to play the woolly anarchist of ’70s comedy as an italicized prima donna who won’t cooperate or sign his contract or even stick around much (he keeps disappearing), yet Wood captures the Belushi persona — the slightly zoned-out disgruntlement, which was already a buried form of entitlement, and which drew Belushi to playing blustery megalomaniacs who attacked the world with violence (the samurai, the self-imploding “Weekend Update” commentator, Bluto). I also thought that Dylan O’Brien really got Dan Aykroyd — the genial Canadian spirit he gave off as he bamboozled people with his tech-jargon verbosity. And Kim Matula gets very close to Jane Curtin’s fake-prim smiling hauteur.

But there are some false notes along with the true ones. Cory Michael Smith captures a lot about Chevy Chase — the scalding wit, the way he lorded it over everyone around him. But he scowls too much, and though I don’t quarrel with the portrayal of Chase as a major dick, he had a surface breeziness that Smith doesn’t. Ella Hunt’s Gilda Radner is too fizzy and amorphous — she doesn’t give off Radner’s force of personality. And I have to say that I was majorly disappointed by the film’s portrayal of Michael O’Donoghue, the visionary of destructive, nihilistic, tasteless trash-the-world comedy who, more than anyone else, brought the sensibility of the National Lampoon into the formative world of “Saturday Night.” O’Donoghue, who (full disclosure) I became friendly with when I was in college, did indeed smoke thin brown cigarettes and harangue the network stooges for messing with his concepts. But he wasn’t this precious grinning troublemaker; he was much more deadpan and hostile and cutting and cool — the comedy writer as remorseless assassin. Couldn’t they have studied some tapes to get the voice right?

All that said, I’ve read a lot of carping about the film’s portrayal of Lorne Michaels, but I thought Gabriel LaBelle’s performance was a bull’s-eye. LaBelle, who played the young Steven Spielberg in “The Fabelmans,” just turned 22, but he’s utterly convincing as Michaels, the producer of “Saturday Night,” who was 30 the night the show premiered. He gets the voice, and the look too — the rounded vowels and passive quicksilver power stare. As much as that, he gives Michaels a fascinating relationship to the chaos around him.

Lorne has to cut three hours’ worth of sketches down by half (all those index cards!), he’s got to stage manage the rampaging egos and massage the network representatives who don’t get the show and don’t trust it and don’t like it. (When he fields a “congratulatory” call from Johnny Carson, it’s clear that Carson, who thinks of NBC as his network, wants the show to die a quick death.) More than that, Lorne has got to believe in this show, to hold it all together in his head, even though he himself doesn’t quite know what it is yet. No one does. For “Saturday Night” will not only be a bigger phenomenon than anyone could have guessed; it will be much greater than the sum of its parts. It will be the revolution no one fully saw coming, even those who launched it.

Here’s the film’s trick. Lorne thinks he knows what he wants the show to do, but he doesn’t know what the show will be. And Reitman, in the hurtling, whipsawing, countdown-to-11:30 form of his movie, mirrors the discovery of what “Saturday Night” was. He could easily have made a film like the one I first envisioned — a meticulous docudrama that spelled out the places “Saturday Night” descended from (the National Lampoon, the Second City troupes of Chicago and Toronto), how it emerged from the drug culture, from feminism, from the whole warped put-on snark of the counterculture. And bits of that are there. At one key moment, Lorne delivers a speech that gets at “Saturday Night’s” appeal from a wistful and almost poetic angle. He says that the show is about everyone at home connecting, in a direct new way, with the late-night romantic mystique of New York City. And he’s right. In the Midwest, where I lived and watched the show in its early years, it really did feel like that. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I would count down the week to a new episode as if it were a mini Christmas.

Mostly, though, Reitman leaves the defining of what “Saturday Night” is to the story taking place between the lines. It’s the reckless vibe of those pre-show 90 minutes — not the last-minute cobbling together of the brick stage, not the locating of the missing Belushi, not even the suspenseful showdown (overstated by the movie, I would say) about whether a “Tonight Show” rerun will be swapped in at the last minute. All of that is propulsive and entertaining, but the real theme of “Saturday Night” (the movie) is that “Saturday Night” (the show) would be the first TV program to take the offstage aggression of showbiz personalities and put it in front of the camera. The reason the Not Ready For Prime Time Players were not ready for prime time is they were too busy showing you exactly who they were. That was their magic. That’s why they came close to being the Beatles of comedy.

In one of the punchiest parts of the movie, Milton Berle, played with jaunty gusto by J.K. Simmons, ambles backstage, where he struts around as if he was God’s gift to show business and to women. He zeroes in on Chevy Chase as “Saturday Night’s” potential breakout star, and therefore a threat to his ego. So he flirts with Chase’s girlfriend, then gets into a verbal pissing match with Chevy that’s so intense you can feel the smoke rising up from it. Berle thinks he’s defeated Chase; he wants to show how superior he is to the new generation. But his acid patter is all backstage stuff — the stuff that comedians of his generation left out of their act. Chevy Chase, and the other pranksters of “Saturday Night,” will inject that killer spirit directly into their comedy. They will be fearless, merciless, no-holds-barred. (The show opens with a sketch about feeding fingertips to wolverines, at which point the two characters seated in armchairs both instantly die of heart attacks.) This is not your Uncle Miltie’s variety show — it’s Uncle Miltie’s id on drugs. And once “Saturday Night” let that genie out of the bottle, television would never be the same, and maybe the world wouldn’t either. Everything that mainstream comedy had spent so long suppressing would no longer be hidden. It would be live.