The urban hell of a nocturnal Manhattan street – steam clouds, neon lights, dark characters on the sidewalk.
Travis Bickle (Robert De Nero), ex-marine, enters the office of a taxi company for a night shift job.
I can’t sleep nights.
Travis’s taxi moves through the seedy streets populated by dealers, pimps, and prostitutes.
Through the windshield he sees endless scenes of corruption.
All the animals come out at night – whores, buggers…venal. Someday
A real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.
During the day he walks alone in the porno streets, checking out the movies.
In his cluttered apartment he lies awake on his bed, watching TV soaps.
Travis saw Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) as she walked into the campaign office of Presidential candidate Charles Palentine where she works as a volunteer. She appeared to him like an angel out of this filthy mess.
At the café fellow drivers exchange stories about midgets, gays – sex and violence they encounter in their routine work.
Travis volunteers to work for Betsy. Betsy is surprised by his obsessive interest in her. Curious, she accepts to meet him. At the coffee shop he invites her to the movies.
One day Palantine rides Travis’s cab, says he learned more about America by riding taxis. Travis expressed his disgust for the city’s squalor.
Next, a young hooker, Iris (Jodie Foster) jumps inside his taxi, trying to run away from an older man.
On his date, the inarticulate Travis takes Betsy to a porno film. During the show, an embarrassed and angry Betsy storms out of the theatre leaving a clueless and puzzled Travis behind. We see Travis at a payphone, asking why she won’t accept his flowers.
The camera tracks back away from him to the lonely hallway out into the dazzling world.
Travis storms into the campaign office, stalking Betsy.
You’re like the rest of them – cold and distant.
The next passenger (director Scorsese) tells Travis to sit still while keeping the meter running. The man is policing his unfaithful wife. Her shadow appears in the window of another man’s apartment. He wants to murder his wife and her black lover with a pistol.
Travis watches Iris and another girl cross the street and pick up two men.
Loneliness has followed me my whole life…I’m God’s lonely man.
His cabbie friend introduces him to ‘Easy’ Andy, a traveling gun salesman. Travis purchases 4 guns and start hard training inside his apartment. He looks at himself in the mirror talking to imaginary enemies-
You talking to me? You talking to me? (Looks behind). Well, who the hell else you are talking to?…. Here’s a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum.
In a store he witnesses a robbery, stands up against the black man, hits him in the head.
When he meets Iris she takes him to her whorehouse after a deal with her pimp ‘Sport’ (Harvey Keitel). Travis is only interested in befriending her. He wants her to run away from the brothel.
The cops don’t do anything.
Iris likes ‘Sport’ but expressed her agony to the pimp, who seduces her to carry on her street life. Travis determines to fight evil with his gun.
My whole life is pointed in one direction...There never has been any choice.
Travis gets a Mohawk hairdo, goes to Palentine’s rally. Moving among the crowd, he approaches Palantine but is spotted and followed by the security bodyguard.
Travis drives to Iris’s place, meets ‘Sport’ and shoots him in the stomach after getting kicked by him. He enters the stairway, shoots the hotel manager, gets shot at the neck, and finally collapses besides a terrified Iris inside her room. The police arrive, the camera tracks through the bloodbath down the stairs along the hallway.
The media hero-worships the psychopathic antihero. A letter from Iris’s father thanks Travis for her homecoming.
While Travis talks with his cabbie friends, Betsy enters his taxi. Palentine has got his nomination. Travis declines her fare and with a deadening stare drives into the dark night.