As far as I can tell, Light Sleeper was Schrader’s attempt to fashion an American Pickpocket (as was, perhaps, the underrated Gigolo). Bresson is one of his heroes and his Pickpocket is a story of a decent-minded criminal who simply seeks a way out. The titular character cruises through the city almost in perpetual shadow, continually unnoticed, so he can ply his trade. And Willem Defoe in Light Sleeper is much the same way. A delivery boy for an unlikely drug kingpin played by Susan Sarandon, Dafoe seems to almost flit from one Manhattan apartment to another, listening to his client’s drug-fueled rants. Beyond that, he barely seems to exist. He lives like a monk, in a Spartan apartment than features only a mattress and a boombox. His attempts at reconciliation with a heroin-addicted ex-wife goes nowhere. Slowly through the course of the film he realizes that he has no control at all over his situation; the only way for him to alter his own trajectory is to act, to reject the passivity with which he has lived for so long. And while tha act costs in his freedom, in Schrader’s view, it also provides him with a second chance.