Anthony Breznican, Vanity Fair

The first thing director Jason Reitman wants people to know about Saturday Night is that it may be about funny people—writers and performers who unquestionably redefined comedy—but it’s not intended to be a laugh riot. The movie plays out in real time over the course of about 90 minutes, and there are certainly comic moments, but there are more tense and fraught ones. The story starts at 30 Rockefeller Center at 10 p.m. on October 11, 1975, and culminates with the first-ever broadcast of Saturday Night Live. What unfolds is less a comedy than a ticking-clock suspense movie. “It’s a thriller-comedy, if you can call that a genre,” Reitman says of the film, which arrives in theaters on October 11. “I always describe this movie as a shuttle launch, and the question was, ‘Would they break orbit?’”

What a perfect comparison of live television to a shuttle launch.

Saturday Night has sounded promising from the jump. Arguably the most exciting thing Jason Reitman’s worked on in years, a cast filled with relative unknowns who are soon to be knowns, and built around the behind the scenes of a creative project. It’s basically every box you could check for me as a movie goer.

As someone who loved Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up in the Air, I hope this is a return to form to Reitman, and this movie rights the ship after those Ghostbusters debacles.