Taxi Driver still feels disturbingly contemporary half a century later

Rocky makes it clear that without boxing, its title character would likely continue muscling around Philadelphia on behalf of loan sharks, despite his generally good nature. It’s harder to tell whether Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), the antihero at the center of Taxi Driver, is being kept from similar criminal activity by the cabbie job we see him attain early in the movie, or if that experience radicalizes him further, nudging him toward vigilantism. Bickle is such a loner that we only get bits and pieces of his backstory. His parents are still alive but not in close contact. He was honorably discharged from the Marines in 1973 (or so he says) and is presumably a veteran of the Vietnam War, now suffering from insomnia — hence the job driving a taxi at night through a New York City he sees as a hellscape.