OPINION: Feed your fingertips to the wolverines

“Saturday Night Live.” As a comedy institution, the name is everything. To this day, we celebrate writers and actors who’ve had a part in the program as “SNL alumni.” From old favorites like Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy to the names which dominated the ‘00s with Will Ferrell and Tina Fey to building modern comedians like John Mulaney and Pete Davidsen.

No matter what, the show doesn’t keep its talent for long, with only 10 of the 167 cast members locking in for over a decade. The show’s legacy is built on young, fresh comedy faces. With the show celebrating its 50th season this year, it represents one of the longest running late night empires and the NBC network’s crowning achievement.

But the most notorious lore of “SNL” is the scramble to assemble a 90-minute comedy show by Saturday night, typically 20 weeks in a row. Former cast member Jay Mohr released his memoir on his tenure in 2004, titled “Gasping for Air: Two Years in the Trenches of Saturday Night Live.” Over and over, the stress of “SNL” has been described like an active warzone, a continuous battle of egos, censors and bombshells from rebellious talent and imposing executives in a quest to be funny.

Along comes the movie “Saturday Night,” which doesn’t seek to be a controlled tome of the program’s lore but rather a slice of time when the show seemed most impossible: 90 minutes before the first broadcast. Nothing is going right, the sketches don’t have a set schedule, the set is crumbling and the actors egos are hot air balloons; surely the show will inevitably be a disaster.

Playing spoiler to the movie’s intentions is historical context; of course the show goes on, and on and on it goes. “SNL” showrunner Lorne Michaels, who in the movie looks like a man possessed through the nervous energy of Gabriel LaBelle’s performance, will become one of the biggest names in television. For the cast of SNL, including Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd, the rest is history.

Even while the movie strums nostalgic heartstrings (John Belushi in the famous bumblebee costume comes to mind), there’s a frantic energy as the camera traverses halls of wacky out-of-context props and bits. The intensity of these 90 minutes feel like a diet “Uncut Gems,” building a threat of full creative meltdown.

What ends up the most fascinating ingredient of the movie, and the sole bit of whether or not it will appeal, is Michaels’s consistent belief in the show’s groundbreaking ability. Frankly, if “SNL” never appealed to you, the movie has few chances to really win back a wasted confidence.

“Saturday Night,” as a movie, only works if the audience has belief in the show’s eventual legacy, or at least in the belief of full creative pursuit. A slate of executives from a young Dick Ebersol played by Cooper Hoffman to Willem Dafoe’s David Tabet paint themselves aloof to history; how could an audience ever want a silly live comedy show when they could have a rerun of Johnny Carson?

It’s this tongue-in-cheek energy which fuels why “Saturday Night” is so compelling, in that with being in the future also, heroes and villains can be picked from this story. This act of mythologizing these celebrities as artists plays to the wild energy which infects young creatives. There’s self-loathing and anxiety, but the power of performance is what rounds up the show’s drifting pieces.

Michaels, who ignores the cries for help from his crew members out of survival more than arrogance, still searches for youthful comedy spirit even when the show can’t go on. Chase battles with his role as a leading man versus the comedy greats inhabiting 30 Rockefeller. Belushi wrestles with his own ego as a self-proclaimed character actor being reduced to bee costumes. Morris feels out of place and underutilized as the only Black cast member, even while conversing with Billy Preston’s band.

The female cast unfortunately doesn’t get the same narrative relevance, despite how fundamental they were in the real life show’s creation. Gilda Radner specifically, played terrifically by Ella Hunt, gets almost nothing to do, despite being one of the most important women in comedy history. Fifty years later, some status quos can’t be shaken.

“Saturday Night” is a blisteringly quick, punchy and eager comedy which can occasionally be overambitious, pretentious and out-of-its-depth, just as the young staff of “SNL” felt in 1975. What keeps “Saturday Night” appealing while parsing and managing its own chaos is a universal appeal to creative possibility. The show must, and will always, go on.