In 2016, Robert De Niro said of presidential candidate Donald Trump: “He’s so blatantly stupid. He’s a punk. He’s a dog. He’s a pig. He’s a con, a bullshit artist, a mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, who doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t care, who’s gaming society, doesn’t pay his taxes. He’s an idiot. Colin Powell said it best: he’s a national disaster, an embarrassment to this country. It makes me so angry that this country has got to this point that this fool, this bozo has wound up where he has. He talks about how he wants to punch people in the face… Well, I’d like to punch him in the face.” The video was considered too partisan to form part of the official #VoteYourFuture initiative for which it was recorded, but it was released separately and captures the De Niro ethos perfectly: timely, serious, direct, uncowed, emotionally intelligent, anti-establishment, virile, clear, rhythmic, politically conscious, legitimate fury. His voice-of-the-people soliloquies still beguile and this latest monologue rhymes, somehow, with Travis Bickle’s “You talkin’ to me?”
He may have inherited this counter-culture eloquence from his New York artist parents: his mother wrote erotica for Anais Nin, while his father Robert De Niro Sr painted in the same expressionist circles as the de Koonings. They divorced when his father came out as gay and remained friends: the actor has since made a poignant HBO documentary about his dad, whose art never received the recognition he felt it deserved (during an interview with Out Magazine, the actor cried at the idea he’d become more famous than the person he was named after). Mentored by the august acting coach Stella Adler, who said he was the best student she ever taught, De Niro Jr caught the eye as a dying baseball player in Bang The Drum Slowly (to this day one of Al Pacino’s favourite films) and as swaggering, Rolling Stones-voltaged Johnny in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. “This kid doesn’t just act – he takes off into the vapors,’’ wrote Pauline Kael in The New York Times.
De Niro’s audition for the role of Sonny Corleone (since made public and described by Francis Ford Coppola as “spectacular”, but “too killer”) conjures up a fascinating alternative Godfather universe. Instead, he was cast as the young Vito Corleone, for which he lived in Sicily to pick up the dialect and won his first Oscar. With only eight words of English, it is a riveting performance: grand-canvas, measured and violently humane. Comparisons to Brando were immediate and Marlon himself even said, “I doubt if he knows how good he is”. De Niro's famously exact role-research (he worked as a cabbie for Taxi Driverand could have boxed professionally by the end of his regime for Raging Bull) has created some of the most relatable rebels in the history of cinema, a vanity-free perfectionism that De Niro describes as a "mixture of anarchy and discipline". Only he, as Travis Bickle, could have captured the full fall from nervy romcom-sweetness to the sort of dream-tense nihilism that would inspire a fanatic who'd seen the film 15 times to try to kill Ronald Reagan.
