I have no idea whether Jason Reitman was a Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip fan, but man, it sure feels like it watching this movie. Either way, this is extremely Sorkinesque, from the labyrinthian walk-and-talks to the dialogue that is sometimes quite clever but rarely laugh-out loud funny. (Personally, I would like a movie about Saturday Night Live to be a bit funny. The cast and crew of SNL do way more laughing and applauding one another onscreen in this movie than I ever did in my theater seat.)

The concept is clever — telling the 90 minutes before the first taping of NBC’s Saturday Night in approximately real time (somehow, this “real time” film that transpires between 10:00 and 11:30 is 110 minutes long) — as is the notion of loosely structuring the movie like an episode of SNL. There are musical guests and celebrity cameos and oddball sketches and bits that don’t work and it gets a little shaggy in the final 15 minutes and in the end the whole cast is there at home base to send you off.

Now, does that concept and that structure work with all the historical episodes Reitman and Gil Kenan crammed into their script? Not really. It’s been a few years since I re-read Live From New York or the underrated Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, but even if you’ve never read a page of either one, there are some notes struck are just patently false. To pick just one: 15 minutes before the premiere of SNL John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Lorne Michaels were shooting the breeze at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink? And the rink is open in early October? And no one else was using it or standing anywhere in the immediate area???

So Saturday Night’s not great history. But if you want history, you go read those aforementioned books. What you go to this film for, I suppose, is the energy, which Saturday Night does have in abundance. The swirling Steadicam shots, the jittery score, the ticking clock counting down the minutes to air, plus a couple performances that really nail the vibe of the Not Ready For Primetime Players, particularly Tommy Dewey as Michael O’Donoghue, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, and especially Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris.

In many ways, this movie is not what the production of the first SNL was like. But its giddy, chaotic, wild, ionate thrill of creation is kind of what I imagined the making of every SNL was like when I was a 16 years old obsessed with the show. And if this had been the pilot of Studio 60, I would have absolutely watched Episode 2.

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