Seeing it again a few years really surprised me. It's not some Hollywood fantasy. The thing that really stands out today about Saturday Night Fever is its fairly gritty, working-class aesthetic and raw depiction of Brooklyn life in the 1970s. And to that extent it has a lot more in common with Taxi Driver than an unsuspecting viewer only familiar with the soundtrack might expect. I mean, there's crumbling infrastructure everywhere, economic stagnation, and dead-end jobs, contrasting with the disco’s escapist glamour [which itself is small and not exactly that glamorous]. But the disco is all the Travolta character has, and provides his life with meaning, identity, transcendence, etc. Gotta be better than his job in a paint store, right!