A saxophone, a marriage, and a city that never sits still
New York, New York begins on V-J Day in 1945, when the war is over and the streets are full of celebration. Into that crowd walks Jimmy Doyle, a saxophonist played by Robert De Niro, who is charming, restless, and determined to become a star. He meets Francine Evans, a singer played by Liza Minnelli, and their meeting becomes both a love story and a professional partnership. They marry, they tour, they argue, and they slowly discover that talent is not the same as compatibility. The film is a musical, but it is also a portrait of two ambitious people learning how hard it is to share a life and a stage.
De Niro plays Jimmy as a man who lives through his instrument. When he plays, he is confident, even joyful. When he stops playing, he is less sure of himself. He jokes, he flirts, he makes big plans, and then he struggles with the ordinary work of listening to another person. That contrast is the core of the performance. Jimmy is not a villain. He is a talented man whose ambition keeps getting in the way of his tenderness. De Niro makes that flaw understandable, because he also shows Jimmy’s warmth: his humour, his loyalty to the band, and his genuine admiration for Francine’s voice.
Learning to play a musician
To prepare for the role, De Niro studied the saxophone, and that preparation shows in how he holds the instrument and moves with a band. He does not mime a musician so much as inhabit the rhythm of one. His shoulders sway, his fingers work, and his attention shifts between the other players and the audience. That physical work matters, because in this film music is not decoration. It is how the characters speak when words fail. A saxophone solo can say what Jimmy cannot say in an argument, and a song can hold a marriage together for one more night.
Martin Scorsese directed the film as a tribute to the old Hollywood musical, with elaborate sets and long, stylised numbers, but also as a modern story about a relationship falling apart. De Niro bridges those two worlds. He can be broad and funny in a musical number, and then small and wounded in a hotel room scene. That range is what keeps Jimmy from becoming a caricature of the selfish male artist. We see the boyish charm that made Francine fall for him, and we see the insecurity that makes him compete with her success.
Ambition and jealousy
As Francine’s career grows, Jimmy’s jealousy grows with it. He wants her to succeed, and he also wants to be the centre of attention. De Niro plays that contradiction without smoothing it away. In one scene, Jimmy is proud of Francine on stage. In the next, he is sulking because the audience is looking at her, not him. That honesty is uncomfortable, and it is the reason the film still feels modern. Many stories about artists pretend that love conquers professional rivalry. New York, New York is braver: it shows that love and rivalry can live in the same room, and that a marriage can fail even when both people still care.
The film also shows how gender shapes that rivalry. Francine is expected to be supportive, patient, and grateful, while Jimmy is allowed to be difficult because he is an artist. De Niro does not excuse Jimmy, but he does show the world that shaped him: a world of late-night clubs, touring buses, and managers who tell men that genius needs room. By playing Jimmy’s selfishness as insecurity rather than cruelty, De Niro invites the audience to see both the charm and the cost of that world.
The city as a character
The title is not an accident. New York is more than a setting. It is the place where Jimmy and Francine meet, where they dream, and where they finally go their separate ways. The film’s New York is both real and imagined: real streets and clubs, but also studio sets that glow like a memory. De Niro’s Jimmy belongs to that city because he is always moving. He walks fast, he talks fast, and he treats every room as a stage. When the relationship cools, that movement becomes sadder. He is still moving, but now he is moving away.
For Past Tunes, that city-and-music connection is especially resonant. The site celebrates the 1970s and 1980s as decades when songs carried stories, and New York, New York is a film about that very idea. Its songs are not just performances. They are arguments, apologies, and farewells. Jimmy’s saxophone is his voice when he cannot find words, and Francine’s singing is her way of claiming space in a world that wants her to be quiet. De Niro’s performance reminds us that behind every great song on a record, there were often difficult, human negotiations about who gets heard.
Why Jimmy Doyle matters in De Niro’s story
Jimmy is sometimes overlooked because the film was not a commercial success on release, and because it sits between De Niro’s more famous crime and boxing roles. That overlook is a mistake. The role shows that De Niro could sing through an instrument, dance through a musical number, and still bring the psychological detail that made his dramatic work so admired. He could be funny without losing seriousness, and romantic without losing edge.
It also shows his willingness to take risks. After the success of his early Scorsese films, he could have stayed with safe, tough roles. Instead, he chose a big, stylised musical about a flawed marriage. That choice says something about his ambition as an artist: he wanted to test himself, to learn a new skill, and to play a man who is not heroic. Jimmy Doyle is not a hero. He is a working musician who loves a singer, who hurts her, and who learns, too late, that talent is not a substitute for attention.
In the film’s final movement, Jimmy and Francine meet again as successful adults. They are polite, they are proud, and they are no longer the same people who danced in 1945. De Niro plays that reunion with restraint. There is no grand reconciliation, no easy happy ending. There is recognition, respect, and a quiet understanding that some loves change shape rather than end. That ending, like the performance as a whole, trusts the audience to feel complexity without being told what to feel. It is a signature De Niro achievement: a man who can be both dazzling and disappointing, and who remains, for all his flaws, unmistakably human.
