Movie Review: Lorne

By John Corrado

As a documentary filmmaker, Morgan Neville has focused on a variety of celebrity subjects, from Mister Rogers in Won’t You Be My Neighbor? to Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner. And, in his Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom, he brought backup singers into the spotlight.

The subject of Neville’s latest film is another behind the scenes figure; Lorne Michaels, the enigmatic creator and producer of Saturday Night Live who has run the comedy show for nearly all of its fifty years.

Neville has perfected this sort of celebrity documentary, and Lorne is not only an entertaining biographical portrait of Michaels, but also a fascinating behind the scenes look at what goes into SNL.

Neville takes us back to that first show in 1975, and charts the ups and downs of SNL throughout the decades, including when Michaels left the show for a few years in 1980. But the film also takes us into the current writers room and lets us be a fly-on-the-wall for the pre-show rehearsal process, with Lorne watching on a monitor from under the bleachers, making his final tweaks to the program’s order in the direct lead-up to the 11:30pm airtime.

We hear from a litany of current and former SNL cast members and writers, including Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig, John Mulaney, Andy Samberg, Adam Sandler and Conan O’Brien, among many others. Many of them recount the highly stressful experience of trying to make Michaels laugh during read-throughs, which has turned him into a figure who has inspired impersonations out of both fear and affection. Case in point, Mike Myers famously used his impression of Michaels as the basis for his Dr. Evil character.

The main theme behind the film is that Michaels is like a curator of comedic voices, not only being the one who discovered so many of these comic talents, but also helping to cultivate them. But there is also a running joke amongst the subjects that many of them still don’t know much about the man himself, who has been notoriously private about his personal life throughout his decades in show business. This allows Neville to be more playful with his approach to sharing Michaels’ backstory (including some fun animated interludes), and not just present this as a beat-by-beat recounting of his life from birth.

There is a traditional talking heads component to this as well, but it helps that these subjects are all very funny and witty people in their own right. This results in Lorne being a solidly produced bio-doc that sheds enough light on its central subject to be engaging and informative, while also being quite entertaining in its own right. It’s highly recommended viewing for any SNL fans or comedy fans in general.