‘Saturday Night’ Review: Not Live, Not Funny, Not Much

The nostalgia is so thick in Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s furiously busy paean to the nascent days of SNL, so unrelenting and potent, that eventually it unmoors from the film and begins swallowing its characters whole, like the titular alien in Steve McQueen’s The Blob.

It’s coming for Gilda Radner, played by British actor Ella Hunt (Kevin Costner’s ongoing Horizon saga). As she observes a coked-up John Belushi (Matt Wood) skating in Rockefeller Center’s famous ice rink—moments before the first episode of the show that would make them both famous was set to air—she wonders aloud if it’s possible to feel nostalgia for a moment even while you are currently experiencing it.

Hunt’s sweet, Radner-like nose scrunches evoke the long-departed comedienne more lovingly and effectively than the cheesy and portentous words she is forced to speak. (The script was written by Reitman and Gil Kenan, co-collaborators on the last two Ghostbusters movies, which were themselves blatant nostalgia fests.) The moment is emblematic of a movie in which a game and generally well-chosen gang of actors must regularly rescue moments of truth from a murky miasma of sentimentality that wafts over the proceedings like the Thai stick smoked occasionally—though not nearly enough—by the creatives on screen.

Reitman does his best to turbo charge this stroll down memory lane by adding a ticking clock in the manner of the old Fox show 24, but it feels like a load of hastily manufactured urgency.

The camera whips and whooshes, chiefly following the Aaron-Sorkin-like walk-and-talk of the show’s creator Lorne Michaels (a graceful under fire Gabriel LaBelle from The Fabelmans) as he negotiates his buzzed and boisterous young cast, a grumpy Union crew and corporate suits. (This being 1975, those suits include a denim patchwork number sported by Cooper Hoffman as a hectoring Dick Ebersol and a black double-breasted beauty worn by Willem Dafoe as NBC’s imperious talent relations maestro David Tebet.)

Speaking of Sorkin, Saturday Night replicates the dubious achievement of the writer-director’s Becoming the Ricardos in being a movie about a classic comedy show that has little interest in actually being funny.

But what it has is some wonderful moments.

There’s Tracy Letts as the venerable comedy writer Herb Sargent discussing fame and death with an already over it Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith from May December). We have the marvelous Rachel Sennott (2020’s Shiva Baby and 2023’s Bottoms) as Rosie Shuster, staff writer and wife of Lorne who takes perversive glee in her power to get self-impressed men to wear hot pants and bee suits on live TV.

As is often the case on the still limping along show today, the musical contributors raise the mood and elevate the overall quality. Naomi McPherson of the Los Angeles band MUNA turns in a lovely “At Seventeen” as Janis Ian; Jon Batiste not only embodies the spirit of Billy Preston, but also provides Saturday Night’s springy score.

Saturday Night’s saving grace comes as a surprise to the audience and seemingly to the film itself.

As Garrett Morris, a performer whose skills were as singular as any of the original cast’s breakout stars but whose limited screen time was a result of an all-white writers room, The New Girl’s Lamorne Morris (no relation)—who won an Emmy last month for his role in the fifth season of Fargo—serves as both the film’s moral center and its most interesting story. The scene where he and Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) sit in the rafters and question their purpose on the show, are one of the few times the movie gets its head above its own wistfulness.