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I wonder who the audience for this movie is supposed to be. Nostalgia-addled geezers who happened to tune in to NBC at 11:30 on the long-ago night of Oct. 11, 1975, for the debut of a new show called "Saturday Night" (soon to be "Saturday Night Live")? Since those moldering oldsters are no longer big moviegoers, perhaps it is hoped that a fit of wistfulness might lure them away from their fancy home-theater setups and down to the multiplexes.

Or maybe it's the youths of today -- the ones still watching SNL in its 49th year -- who are the target audience for "Saturday Night." If so, they may be puzzled by the big deal the movie makes about the show's launch, and all the off-camera foofaraw that accompanied it (backstage pot antics don't seem all that wild and crazy anymore). And since the movie focuses only on the first-ever broadcast, those younger fans, who can now pick and choose among endless YouTube clips for their SNL fixes, may be vaguely disappointed by not seeing some of their vintage faves alluded to in the film -- people like Chris Farley, Phil Hartman or Eddie Murphy, maybe, or Tina Fey or Kristen Wiig. But they won't.

What they will see is a simulation of the show's founding cast -- the one that did in fact change television and American culture in often-noted ways. There's Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) and Garrett Morris (played by Lamorne Morris, no relation). Also pinballing around are saturnine head writer Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), inaugural host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson (both played by Nicholas Braun), and -- struggling to stay atop all the story's rather forced backstage frenzy -- Canadian comedy-heads Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) and his wife, the long-undervalued writer and sketch specialist Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott).

Focusing on one night in the long history of SNL -- or actually just the 90 minutes of that night between the end of the first dress rehearsal and the show's official airtime -- the movie feels overstuffed, as if there had been too much material to deal with. (The picture isn't based on any of the books about SNL, but on new interviews with surviving participants in its launch.) It would be understandable if director and cowriter Jason Reitman ("Juno," "Tully," "Ghostbusters: Afterlife") became overwhelmed by the many elements available for his film and ran out of time to fully structure it. At least one of the characters (Willem Dafoe's chilly NBC hatchet man) is annoyingly ambiguous, and another (Nicholas Podany's Billy Crystal) could have been deep-sixed altogether with no loss to the picture. And while the great J.K. Simmons' impersonation of NBC comedy god Milton Berle is positioned in the film as if it were a triumph of character-capture, it's hard to imagine a major actor who bears less resemblance than Simmons to the braying Berle -- an old-school comic whose ilk would ultimately be elbowed aside by the SNL upstarts.

The movie is predictably undermined by the fact that we know where it's going and how it will end. We feel no anxiety about Michaels possibly screwing up his first big TV opportunity and getting the chop from NBC, because the show is still on the air today. Nor can there be any concern about the headstrong Belushi not signing his NBC contract before showtime: You can still see him with O'Donoghue doing "Wolverines," the first-ever SNL sketch, on -- where else? -- YouTube.

The picture makes some no-big-deal adjustments to the facts of its story, but it also dispenses a bold bit of misinformation about NBC's reigning talk-show king Johnny Carson, who is portrayed (by a voice on the phone) as being hostile to Michaels' new show. In fact, it was Carson himself who pressured the network to create a new Saturday night program so that it would stop airing "Tonight Show" reruns on weekends, allowing Johnny, in pursuit of more time off, to rerun the shows on selected weeknights. The movie's endorsement of this apparently bogus conflict is especially odd since it was Michaels' company, Broadway Video, that produced the picture.

As undercooked as the movie may be, it has some lively performances. Matt Wood pulls off the difficult trick of capturing Belushi's belligerent charisma without slipping into facile muggery. And Lamorne Morris manages to give Garrett Morris some of the respect he was never accorded as the show's token Black person. (Garrett was also a Broadway veteran and a playwright, if not a particularly compelling comedy performer.) And it's fun to see the nods to famous old show elements like the ridiculous Bees sketch that so infuriated Belushi, and O'Donoghue plunging imaginary skewers into the eyes of an imaginary Mr. Rogers. There are also attentive little touches like a passing glimpse of Howard Shore's All-Nurse Band (an early gig for the future Hollywood soundtrack titan).

But there's no ignoring the movie's dominant problem: It is essentially a tightly bundled collection of anecdotes that never cohere as a plot. Even more disappointingly, it's not all that funny, either.

To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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