Review: Roofman

The saddest romantic comedy or the sunniest tragedy in recent memory, Derek Cianfrance's "Roofman" walks a tonal tightrope with the same dizzied conviction its real-life subject once used to tiptoe across the rafters of North Carolina’s fast-food landscape. The film's titular character, Jeffrey Manchester, an Army vet turned McDonald’s-robbing folk hero, could’ve easily been spun into a cautionary tale or lionized as some criminal savant. Instead, Cianfrance makes him something trickier: a lovable idiot genius, as likely to offer you his coat while locking you in a walk-in freezer as he is to flee prison and take up residence inside a Toys R’ Us.

Enter Channing Tatum, who approaches the role of Manchester with the full force of his peculiar screen charisma: the jock-next-door who took an improv class once and liked it a little too much. It’s pitch-perfect casting. Tatum doesn’t just sell the guy’s getaways and goofy roller-skate montages, he sells the sincerity. When Jeffrey delivers his voiceover intro (“This is the part of the story where I hope you’re wondering how a nice guy like me got involved in all this”), Tatum actually makes you wonder.

That’s the movie’s secret sauce: belief. You believe that this guy, who committed upwards of 45 fast food heists, is really just trying to provide for the family he can’t legally contact. You believe that his decision to hide in a big-box toy store, fashioning a secret lair and selling stolen video games to survive, is somehow not only plausible but deeply relatable. And, most importantly, you believe that when he meets Leigh Wainscott (a note-perfect Kirsten Dunst) at a church toy drive, sparks might actually fly.

Roofman could’ve coasted on the stranger-than-fiction plot alone. But Cianfrance, never one for clean lines or simple emotions, treats the story like a diorama of contradictions. There’s broad comedy, the kind that has Tatum bath-time ambushed by Peter Dinklage’s suspicious store manager, and there’s swooning romance. There’s caper energy and melancholic inevitability. Manchester isn’t just on the run; he’s spiraling toward a domestic fantasy he’ll never be able to sustain. That the film lets us root for that fantasy anyway is a small miracle.

Tatum’s performance veers between puppyish charm and quietly tragic self-delusion. It’s a high-wire act that occasionally teeters, especially when some of the voiceover exposition tips toward over-explanation, but never truly falls. Opposite him, Dunst does what Dunst always does: she roots everything in a lived-in emotional truth. Leigh isn’t just a plot point; she’s the heart of the film. Watch how her expressions flicker between affection and suspicion. Her faith in Jeffrey isn’t blind, it’s hopeful, and that’s somehow more heartbreaking.

The supporting cast is stacked and sharp: Lakeith Stanfield as the loyal Army buddy trying to coordinate an escape plan; Juno Temple as his ride-or-die girlfriend; Uzo Aduba and Ben Mendelsohn as the churchgoers who offer kindness and complicate loyalties; Lily Collias as Leigh’s daughter, wary yet open-hearted. Even the bit players, many of them Charlotte locals and even some of Manchester’s real-life acquaintances, add texture to the film’s sense of place.

Cianfrance is still Cianfrance, of course, and Roofman never lets you fully forget the looming consequences. It’s his most audience-friendly film to date, but it still carries the bruises of Blue Valentine and the generational ache of The Place Beyond the Pines. There’s joy here, but it’s joy under siege. The McDonald’s robberies are fun until they’re not. And the love story? It’s sweet until it starts to feel like a countdown.

Yet that’s also what gives the movie its bite. Roofman isn’t just about a man on the run; it’s about the impossibility of pausing a life long enough to live it. Tatum's Jeffrey wants to freeze time, live in the aisles of nostalgia, build a little family out of stolen moments and off-brand Barbie dolls. The world, unfortunately, is not a Toys R’ Us. Sooner or later, someone turns on the lights.

When the credits roll, you may not know how to feel, only that you feel a lot. And maybe that’s what makes Roofman such a strange and lovely triumph. It believes in empathy over absolution, absurdity over logic, longing over judgment.

4/5