While TV history is being written: The legendary sketch show gets a sweet, funny time capsule in “Saturday Night”.

The focus is on the last 90 minutes before a very significant moment in television history Saturday eveninga realistic, real-time look back at what it was like for producer Lorne Michaels and his team when they premiered the Almighty, Insane Saturday Night Live.

The show is in its 50th season this year, so there’s no better time for a fun look back at how it all began. I’m old enough to report that my 7-year-old self watched a strange-looking guy named John Belushi take over our television screen live in 1975, rather than a Johnny Carson rerun on a Saturday night. As he grabbed his heart and fell to the floor – live from New York – a new era of comedy began.

The absolutely perfect cast under director Jason Reitman allows the cast to include Belushi (Matt Wood), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) and Michaels himself (Gabriel LaBelle). convincingly portrayed that they almost lost their minds before launching a hugely successful mass media experiment.

The film meticulously recreates many classics SNL Moments like Andy Kaufman’s (Nicholas Braun) legendary Mighty Mouse routine and the “heartwarming” Wolverine series debut sketch with Belushi and then-head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey). There are Easter eggs everywhere, including glimpses of land sharks, the killer bees, and even Colon Blow cereal.

The original Saturday evening The show – oddly enough – included Jim Henson’s Muppets, much to O’Donoghue’s chagrin. In a brilliant double cast, Nicholas Braun also plays the frustrated Henson, who despairs over the lack of script pages and the crew’s tendency to hang effigies of Big Bird with a noose in his office.

When Lorne Michaels and co-producer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) brought their live sketch show to the air, American television was in the midst of a golden age that wasn’t aging particularly well. TV dinosaurs like Milton Berle (played here by JK Simmons, who nails the nasty icon) still dominated prime time and late nights.

In one of the film’s greatest scenes, Berle dances lazily in a cardboard cutout number on a fictional variety show that perfectly represents how bad those ’70s variety shows were; In fact, I thought it was real at first. Michaels comes in and offers the show’s dejected director a job for less money; The director is happy to accept this in order to cleanse his creative palette.

Smith and O’Brien are particularly good at capturing the essence of Chase and Aykroyd – not just during their famous skits, but also in their alleged backstage behavior over the years. Aykroyd was a womanizer who had (or attempted to have) affairs with almost every woman in the crew and cast, while Chase was anxious to increase his fame and get away SNL as soon as he could.

While Smith and O’Brien provide complete characterizations, the same can’t really be said of Woods Belushi. While it’s not a bad job, Wood’s portrayal is the closest thing to a caricature. It’s hard to believe Belushi was such a piece of crap in real life.

One of the film’s most touching scenes is the depiction of Belushi and Radner at the Rockefeller Center rink, thinking about the future and where they would be “in 20 years.” Unfortunately, neither made it out of the 1980s. (Belushi died in 1982, Radner in 1989).

The real-time approach, the brilliant cast and the masterful attention to historical detail make it what it is Saturday evening A sweet and funny time capsule that could help inspire a new appreciation for a show we may have taken for granted over the years. The madness depicted in this film has been going on for five decades, with Michaels hosting most of the shows and seasons.

How does he do that? We’ll never know. I mean, we can make a few guesses. Chemicals must be involved, right? At least he has to take B12 shots… B12 shots laced with cocaine?

Saturday evening plays in theaters throughout the valley.