Travis Bickle is not a hero.

Travis Bickle is, by most standards, a creep. Only a creep could live alone in New York City in an apartment that is best described as a converted crack den, spend his days watching porn and his nights working the graveyard shift as a Manhattan cabbie and all the while lie to his parents about a high-profile job in the government.


Leave it to Martin Scorsese, however, to turn such a morally-ambiguous, sex-addicted, troubled loner into possibly one of the greatest movie heroes of all time. Or rather, an anti-hero. Taxi Driver, the 1976 Best Picture nominee and Scorsese’s crowning achievement accomplishes the impossible by making the unlikable likeable, the seedy…well, still seedy, but heroically seedy, a feat of immense proportions.

Bickle (a superb Robert De Niro), clearly craving a human connection, is only in contact with the outside world during his late-night taxi runs. Blowing a could-be relationship with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) due to his lack of knowledge about women and his pornography addiction, Bickle delves deeper into a depression and discovers even further the amount of immorality and filth that haunts the streets he drives through nightly. He meets a child prostitute named Iris (a teenaged Jodie Foster, in an awe-inspiring performance) and becomes obsessed with liberating her from her oppressive pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel.) Though the 12-year-old claims that she prefers being around morally-bankrupt adults over going to school and having a normal adolescence, Bickle makes it his personal mission to save Iris, regardless of the imminent dangers he faces.

Taxi Driver and Bickle have together spawned a generation of these un-heroes in modern film. You don’t want to like them or support them, but upon viewing that one miniscule indication of humanity and, most overwhelmingly, pain that consumes their character, you find yourself in their corner. Before you know it, you’ve been coerced into backing Travis Bickle, or more recently, Randy Robinson, Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, a tired man who ruins his threadbare relationship with his daughter and refuses doctor’s advice post-heart attack in order to re-vamp his dingy, bare-bulb rec-center wrestling career. Even more mainstream is Christian Bale’s Batman in The Dark Knight, who, eerily similar to Bickle, is a vigilante taking matters into his own hands to save those in trouble, despite the laws he breaks and the destruction he causes.

Cringe-worthy as it is at times, Taxi Driver offers a peculiar and perverse sense of comfort in the aftermath of its explosive finale, after it becomes clear that whoever said that humankind is just looking for a hero sure said a mouthful. Watch this movie immediately. It’ll stay with you for good.