For approximately a decade from the mid-1970s, screen actor Robert De Niro came to embody the ethos of urban America—most particularly New York City, where he was born, raised, and educated—in a series of performances that demonstrated a profound and introspective intelligence, great power, and the paradigm skills of the acting technique known as the Method at its best.

In his gallery of violent or otherwise troubled men and social misfits, it is in his portrayal of Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) that his image is likely to remain forever enshrined. As the disturbed, nervy, under-educated Vietnam vet who, through the skewed vision of his isolation and ignorance, sets out on a bloody crusade to cleanse society's ills, De Niro displayed an armory of personal gifts unmatched by any actor of his generation. The film itself was...