It would be a drastic understatement to say that the world is a markedly different place because of “Saturday Night Live”. I have neither the time nor the energy nor the inclination to try and catalogue all the legendary comedians and iconic characters that came to us from SNL. That said, there’s definitely a sense that Lorne Michaels is past his prime. The show is badly in need of new ideas and approaches from the top down, and more can absolutely be done to change with the times.

I need hardly add that SNL’s treatment of Donald Trump over the past ten years was — and still is — a subject of significant controversy.

So here’s Saturday Night, a dramatization of the 90 minutes leading directly up to the grand premiere of SNL on October 11th, 1975. The film comes to us from director Jason Reitman, who also wrote and produced alongside frequent collaborator Gil Kenan. Considering that Reitman grew up on a first-name basis with many early SNL alumni (see: Ghostbusters), I won’t question his qualifications to take on this particular project.

I do find it slightly questionable that Reitman is clearly trying to out-Sorkin Aaron Sorkin, but then I remember that Reitman made his debut with Thank You for Smoking. His chops aren’t as refined, but the chops are there nonetheless.

With all of that said, I am woefully ignorant about the early years of SNL. I can’t speak to how accurately any of the characters or events are depicted. That said, the best compliment I can pay to this freaking massive cast is that none of the performances felt like impersonations. Top to bottom, it felt like everyone was playing a character and embodying the person in the moment. You know, acting.

That said, it bears mentioning that pretty much every performance in this movie is outrageously heightened to match the relevant people and their circumstances. As the film’s poster so astutely put it…

“The writers are inebriated. The set is on fire. The sound system is wrecked. The actors are physically assaulting each other. The crew is in open revolt. They have 90 minutes to figure it all out or the network is pulling the plug.”

And even that summation is underselling it. This whole movie is 90 minutes of pure chaos. There is simply too much going on here to sufficiently recap or review here. Which is at once the best and worst thing about this picture.

Yes, it’s exhilarating to follow Lorne Michaels (here immortalized by Gabriel LaBelle) as he desperately tries to juggle all the meetings and personal drama and technical mishaps just long enough to make it to air. I need hardly add that as a theatre producer, this hit me right where I live. But more importantly, the chaos is crucial to the themes of the film.

The film is explicitly clear in portraying SNL as a home for orphaned misfit comedians too young and radical to get their big break anywhere else. The unfortunate downside is that Michaels took a bunch of reckless drugged-up comedians with massive chips on their respective shoulders and put them all in one room. It would be enough of a challenge to control the ambition of Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), the debauchery of Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), and freaking everything about John Belushi (Matt Wood), so try and imagine all of that multiplied by a hundred people on the cast and crew and they’re all working together on the same project.

More to the point, Michaels (as portrayed in the film) makes a huge deal about how SNL is a TV show made of, by, and for the first generation that was raised by television. In theory, that sounds awesome. In practice, it’s all so radically new that nobody — least of all Michaels himself — has any idea what it is or how to make it. This naturally causes friction with the studio execs (mainly Dick Ebersol and his boss David Tebet, respectively played by Cooper Hoffman and Willem Dafoe), not to mention the old guard of television talent (Milton Berle as played by J.K. Simmons, and Johnny Carson as briefly and unflatteringly voiced by Jeff Witzke).

And of course we can’t forget the underlying knowledge that this will all work out. Not that the film ever mentions it, but it’s impossible to watch this movie without the knowledge that all this chaos will work out and the end result will be a TV show that’s still on the air nearly 50 years later. So the point is made that we never know where the next big thing will come from, there’s no telling what risks will pan out, every great leap forward requires a massive risk, and so on.

Unfortunately, the flip side to so much going on all at once is that there’s not much time for anything to register as funny or dramatic or memorable. My favorite case in point is Tracy Letts (here playing SNL writer Herb Sargent), who gets maybe two minutes to act his ass off and then he’s out of the movie forever.

And of course it should be no surprise that the climax is a mess. There’s too much to tie up in a neat little bow at the end, and too little time to do it in. It’s astounding how quickly everything immediately resolves itself, against all internal logic and pacing. There are whole storylines that get abruptly dropped at the last minute just to get everything to where the plot needs it to be.

Most importantly, this movie fails to sell why the show and the original players were all so hysterically funny. Yes, a lot of that has to do with the fact that we don’t see much of the actual show, and the few rehearsals we do see go catastrophically wrong. Even so, when we do see the show working as intended and we’re not laughing as hard as the audience in the movie, that’s kind of a big problem.

Saturday Night is yet another movie that gets by on style instead of substance. It’s great fun to watch in the moment, but it’s hard to remember any great performances or moments or jokes after the fact because it all flies by so quickly. The best we’re left with is threadbare messaging about the risk and sacrifice that come with making some great new work of art. I might add that while the film has a starry-eyed outlook with regard to the SNL of old, that’s hardly relevant to what SNL currently is or why we still need it.

This one is much better-suited for streaming on Peacock. Except neither NBC nor Comcast had anything to do with this movie. No, this was made by Reitman’s friends at Sony/Columbia Pictures, who — so far as I’m aware — have nothing to do with the actual TV show. Huh. I wonder what that’s about.