‘Saturday Night’ is a whirlwind trip, beautifully edited, to one night in history – 11 October 1975 – when ‘Saturday Night Live’ was launched on NBC. We see the events leading up to the live broadcast – and it could so easily have been canned at the last minute – at 11:30pm that evening, as we see all the frenetic, misshapen, uncontrollable eccentric types who in some cases didn’t even have a contract with just minutes to go before they were due on air. Nothing is in order, chaos reigns, and a fifty year legendary showcase of comedic talent had yet to be unleashed.

Like Robert Altman’s ‘The Player’, ‘Saturday Night’ is very skittish, with a roving camera that takes us into a series of lives, and caricatures of lives, with vignettes and glimpses into the world of very big egos, all of whom want their moment of fame, but who have yet to be finessed into any discernible shape. No one, not even the legendary producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), can articulate exactly what the show is supposed to be, and there is the feeling that no one at the time quite knew what they were in for. We even hear Johnny Carson telling Michaels that the show has been set up to fail, and in so doing it will make Carson’s chat show at the same time seem all the more prestigious and durable.

Whether any of this actually happened in the way described here is not the point. There is a clear sense that this was a moment of anarchy which found expression in the televisual form, and it found an audience hungry for this tale of nonconformists and eccentrics coming together in their divergent ways to make something artistic and creative. Having Willem Dafoe as the Head of Talent at NBC, who so nearly pulled the plug and prevented the show from going out, adds to the tension of the spectacle, as someone from a different generation who is not impressed by the anarchy engulfing the studio and who couldn’t have been clearer that the show did not deserve to go on without a readiness to conform to the vision and steadfastness of the network that was on safer ground with Carson and his tried-and-tested ‘Tonight’ show.

The downside, however, is that ‘Saturday Night’ comes across as a superficial, episodic drama which is full of creative types bemoaning the fact that their script is unwritten, unfinished or lost, and how the draft show has overrun by several hours and cannot possibly be condensed into 90 minutes. And for all its finesse, and impressive 16mm cinema verite – we feel we are watching something that took place in the mid-1970s – this is a little too scattershot to work for anyone who isn’t already familiar with, and frankly sympathetic to, the madcap world of ‘SNL’.