A Vietnam War veteran living in New York City, Travis Bickle takes a job as a night-shift taxi driver to cope with chronic insomnia and a growing sense of isolation. He spends his nights weaving through the city’s streets, often stopping at adult movie theaters and pouring his thoughts into a diary where he tries to crystallize his own rules of life. He clings to small aphorisms, among them a persistent mindset that tries to measure health by feeling, a line he writes down and revisits as the city wears on his nerves.
From the start, Travis is repulsed by the crime and urban decay he witnesses, and his disappointment blooms into a larger, more dangerous dream: to clear the streets of what he perceives as filth and corruption. His fixation on moral order leads him to seek an intense personal transformation. He becomes consumed with a plan to puncture the city’s moral rot, even as his mind oscillates between desire for meaningful connection and a brittle, explosive impulse.
A key thread in his drifting life is Betsy, a campaign worker for a candidacy that he views through a distorted lens of political idealism and personal longing. He asks her out for coffee, and she agrees to a second date. Their time together reveals a widening gulf between their worlds: she accepts a date that takes them into a venue she finds uncomfortable, and a later attempt at reconciliation ends with her walking away, leaving him to confront the fragility of any possible closeness. His anger surfaces in a public outburst at the campaign office, where his crude confrontation earns him the ire of the staff and his removal from the premises.
To make sense of his escalating rage, Travis talks with a fellow taxi driver who is not convinced by his fears or his dreams of action. This confidant’s pragmatism clashes with Travis’s intensity, highlighting the rift between cynicism and conviction. In response, Travis reshapes his body as a form of self-discipline: he intensifies his training, learning to move with the precision he believes a cleaner world would require. He also makes contact with a black-market weapons dealer and acquires several handguns, practicing quick-draw techniques in the privacy of his apartment and imagining himself as both judge and avenger.
As the nights unfold, Travis begins to observe the city’s more vulnerable corners—particularly Iris, a young girl entangled in prostitution who works the streets around him. He meets with her in private, ostensibly to persuade her to abandon her path, though his intervention is fraught with moral ambiguity and personal motive. His commitment to action becomes more concrete after he shaves his head into a mohawk and attends a public rally with the intention of carrying out an assassination. The moment is narrowly thwarted when security agents intervene, forcing him to withdraw rather than execute his plan.
The escalation continues as he secures a new, more personal target: the pimp who controls Iris’s life. He enters a brothel, neutralizes the pimp, and also shoots one of Iris’s clients, a mafioso figure. A brutal confrontation with a bouncer ends with Travis killing him and sustaining multiple gunshot wounds of his own. Severely injured and facing death, he collapses onto a couch beside a distressed Iris, and, with police closing in, he mimics firing a shot with a bloody finger in a final, unsettling image of his attempted suicide.
Despite the severity of his actions, the outcome is paradoxical: the press lauds him as a heroic vigilante rather than as a criminal, and he does not face prosecution for the murders. A letter from Iris’s parents in Pittsburgh confirms that she is safe and pursuing her education, which adds a sense of bittersweet closure to the immediate consequences of his violence. During his recovery, he returns to his job and crosses paths with Betsy again, who has followed the newspapers’ coverage of his story. He drops her at her home, refuses any monetary reward, and drives away with a small, inscrutable smile. A lingering tension remains as he notices something unsettling in his rearview mirror, but he continues to drive through the night, leaving the ending open to interpretation and the character’s future unresolved.
