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Nineteen-year-old Tony Manero, from an Italian-American neighbourhood of Brooklyn, lives for the Saturday nights he spends with his gang in the 2001 Odyssey disco, where he is the acknowledged king. Belittled by his unemployed father when he receives a small raise at work, and reproachfully compared by his mother to his elder brother Frank Jnr., who is studying for the priesthood, Tony stops feeling such a black sheep when Frank Jnr. one day appears at home, having given up his vocation. He also manages to date Stephanie, whom he has seen dancing at the studio but who scorns his limited aspirations and boasts of her show business PR job and her intention to leave Brooklyn for an apartment in Manhattan. She agrees, however, to partner him in an upcoming dance contest at the disco and Tony drops his regular partner Annette. One of his friends, Gus, is meanwhile beaten up by rival Puerto Ricans, and another, Bobby, is anguished about a girl he has made pregnant and the pressure he is under to marry her. Tony is temporarily fired from his job when he insists on taking the afternoon off to help Stephanie move to Manhattan, and is upset at meeting a man with whom she has been involved. To avenge Gus, Tony and his friends raid a Puerto Rican gang, the Barracudas, who turn out not to be the culprits; on the night of the contest, angrily rejecting what he sees as the hypocrisy and discrimination of his environment, Tony turns over the first prize presented to him and Stephanie to a Puerto Rican couple. Stephanie flees when he frustratedly makes advances to her, and he drives off with his friends, who gang-rape the drunk but inexperienced Annette, while the desperate Bobby skylarks on a bridge and falls to his death. Contritely arriving at Stephanie's new apartment, Tony announces that he is also leaving Brooklyn and they agree to be friends.

Since its release in the United States, Saturday Night Fever has been credited with setting off two explosions: one is the surge of new applicants for dancing classes that teach the sinuously athletic disco steps; the other is the career of John Travolta, a relative unknown (he was a slobbish juvenile in Carrie) now being acclaimed as a smouldering rebel in the mould of the young Brando. Admittedly, John Badham's frenetic, relentlessly exaggerated direction does its best to make instant iconography of both the dancing and the star. The disco sequences are effectively self-contained and claustrophobic, with an overwhelming, pounding rhythm that the film artificially tries to carry over into its sociological scene-setting outside. But a barrage of optical effects and tricked-up camerawork too often reduces even the dances to the kind of gaudy display that might be considered 'eye-catching' on a Top of the Pops show. Travolta fares even worse, since the film is prepared to leave him alone and show his paces only on the dance floor, but otherwise buttresses his moody if scarcely very intense presence with some slavish camera angles and a cynically overwritten concoction of meeting-cute scenes and social-consciousness raising. Norman Wexler's script, in fact, seems almost deliberately to undermine the vigour and novelty of the disco element with its creaking fiction of a confined but perceptive boy from an ethnic ghetto who finally sees the limitations of his background and sets about transcending them. One conventional scène à faire after another pops up to make a point: the restless roving of Tony and his friends, during which they discuss the viciousness of the System; their assault on the headquarters of a rival gang, after one of their number is beaten up, only to discover later that they may have hit the wrong group of 'spics'; Tony's anger at the end when he realises that his win in the dance contest was only due to ethnic rivalry, and he hands his trophy over to the Puerto Rican couple whom he feels did better. Some of the comedy works reasonably well, such as Stephanie's desperate attempts to prove she is on the way up by recounting the stream of celebrities who pass through the show-biz agency where she works (such as Laurence Olivier, the famous actor from the instamatic camera ads), or the ritual of exchanged slaps and insults at the Manero dinner table. But the film is unable to capitalise on these more promising moments, opting for a lame and sentimental resolution of Tony and Stephanie's relationship, and failing to extract more than the obvious and isolated psychological 'meaning' from the central crisis in family life, the desertion of the priesthood by Tony's elder brother ("Maybe if you ain't so good", Tony muses to his fallen sibling, "I ain't so bad"). Most details of character and setting, finally, are reduced to simplistic icons, mingling with such over-emphasised bric-a-brac as posters of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Rocky and Al Pacino - the latter inspiring one complete little scene in which Tony wakes blearily from a night at the 2001 Odyssey disco, remembers the girl who complimented him by comparing him to Pacino, and startles his grandmother by stalking nearly naked to the bathroom repeating the "Attica!" chant from Dog Day Afternoon.

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