Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt
Rowdy, profane, star studded, Jason Reitman’s (Juno, Up in the Air, Young Adult) Saturday Night captures the glorious circus behind the very first episode of NBC’s long-running live sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live.
America, mid-1970s: Against a backdrop of Watergate, Vietnam, and rising counterculture, a new dawn is about to break onto the nation’s TV screens. Diving into the frenzied 90 minutes before SNL‘s debut, we find barely contained madness backstage, with a young Lorne Michaels (The Fabelmans‘ Gabriel LaBelle) desperately trying to keep it all together before the red light goes on.
Fully recreating the creative volatility of SNL’s anarchic, storied beginnings with then-stars John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Dan Akroyd and more, Saturday Night is a wildly entertaining watch that’s appropriately stacked with talent, including Willem Dafoe as a menacing studio exec in orange-tinted sunnies, Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, and Succession‘s Nicholas Braun on double duty (and in remarkably effective cosplay) as both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson.