Schrader has spoken of Light Sleeper as the final panel in a triptych of films about male loners which also includes Taxi Driver and American Gigolo. Featuring one of Schrader's tautest and most effective screenplays, Light Sleeper tells the story of a New York City drug runner grappling with a midlife crisis and framed for a drug-related murder. Schrader's return to the mean streets of Manhattan is notably melancholic, suffused with an aura of regret and longing that adds nuance to all of its characters. Willem Dafoe offers a poignant and powerful rendering of the dealer’s moving struggle to reassemble his life and reconnect with a lost love.

Schrader's rarely screened directorial debut thrust him to the front ranks of the New Hollywood as one of the most politically astute and precocious of the young Turks who seized the studio reins. Centered on a trio of frustrated auto factory workers who rob their union office in an act of desperate rebellion, Blue Collar is structured on the type of genre-derived narrative – here, that of the caper film – that recurs throughout Schrader's films. Blue Collar is, however, far more interested in place than its cops and robbers story, focusing on the rich details of a working class community and the type of alienation that unites its inhabitants in a constant and ultimately futile struggle.