Serving out a six-month suspension, Merchant Seaman Tommy Campbell (Jan-Michael Vincent) rents an apartment on New York’s Lower East Side and passes the time painting and trying to learn Spanish in hope of getting assigned to a ship that is heading to Panama.

Tommy just wants to be left alone but he finds himself being drawn into the close-knit neighborhood.  He becomes friends with Carmine (Danny Aiello) and more than friends with his upstairs neighbor (Theresa Saldana).  He becomes a mentor to a street kid (Fernando Lopez) who lives with a punch-drunk boxer named called Whacko (Lenny Montana).  Abe (Art Carney), who owns the local bodega, agrees to let Tommy use his phone.

Tommy also finds himself drawing the attention of Angel Cruz (Rudy Ramos), head of the local street gang.  Tommy doesn’t want to get involved in any trouble.  He just wants to serve his suspension and sail to Panama.  But with Angel and his gang terrorizing the neighborhood and even robbing a church bingo game, Tommy and his friends finally stand up to the gang.

Defiance is more intelligent and realistic than many of the other urban vigilante movies that came out in the 70s and 80s.  Tommy never becomes a cold-blooded killer, like Charles Bronson did in the Death Wish films.  Instead, he spends most of the film trying to stay out of trouble and, when he does stand up for himself and the neighborhood, he does so realistically.  He fights the gang members but he doesn’t set out to the kill them.  About as deliberately destructive as he and Carmine get is that they destroy Angel’s car.  Rather than being a typical vigilante movie, Defiance is a portrait of a neighborhood where everyone takes care of everyone else.  Angel and his gang mistake the neighborhood’s kindness for weakness.  The neighborhood proves them wrong.

Defiance stars two actors who never quite got their due.  Theresa Saldana’s promising career was derailed when she was attacked and nearly killed by a deranged stalker in 1982.  Though she recovered and went on to do a lot of television, she never became the star that she should have.  Jan-Michael Vincent did become a star in the 70s and 80s but he later became better-known for his struggles with drugs and alcohol.  Both of them are very good in Defiance and leave you thinking about the careers that they could have had if things had just gone differently.