Directed by: Derek Cianfrance
Written by: Derek Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn
Starring: Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, and Peter Dinklage
Runtime: 125 minutes.
Rated: R
Channing Tatum robs McDonald’s, and steals heart, in charming ‘Roofman’
I never expected to see Derek Cianfrance go full screwball, directing Channing Tatum with both cheeks out crashing around a Toys R Us. But then, I didn’t expect a lot of things about 2025, and here we are.
Cianfrance, the deadly serious writer-director behind feel-bad movies “Blue Valentine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” drops the remaining vestiges of the Cassavetes-esque gritty naturalism that marked his career as one to watch for heartwarming middlebrow populism in “Roofman,” a film that has Tatum running naked through a Toys R Us in full Looney Tunes mode with a Spider-Man backpack.
In a story ripped from early aughts headlines, Jeffrey Manchester (Tatum) is a down-on-his-luck dad whose financial precarity and lack of steady work is tearing his young family apart. After one disappointing children’s birthday party too many, Jeffrey, desperate to win back the love of his children and their mother, picks up some shift work at McDonald’s. More specifically, he breaks into and robs McDonald’s. Actually, a lot of McDonald’s. His process is always the same, breaking in through the roof at night, lying in wait for the morning, then locking the workers in freezers or storerooms while he makes off with the cash.
It's a very successful and lucrative scheme. But while Jeffrey has the conniving brain of a super villain, he hasn’t the heart; he’s such a teddy bear, he gives one employee his jacket before locking him in the freezer so he doesn’t get too cold.
The loveable lug gets arrested and slapped with a weighty prison sentence, but the scheming doesn’t stop there, and before long Jeffrey has hatched a grand prison escape, hitching a ride out of town and into, of all places, a Toys R Us – the last place anyone would think to search for an escaped convict. Jeffrey does his usual trick, breaking in through the roof and hiding in the in-between spaces. Eventually he finds a roomy, hollow space of store architecture in which to hide in plain sight during the day, behind the bike racks. He makes a kind of dorm room of it, popping on headphones and napping on inflatable kids’ furniture while oblivious families shop all around him.
This is the best, most charming part of “Roofman,” watching Jeffrey go full “My Side of the Mountain” in the Toys R Us liminal space, surviving on candy and taking baths in the sink of the staff bathroom at night while he tries to outwait the manhunt.
But one can’t live off pilfered peanut M&M’s forever. A man as golden-retriever-boyfriend coded as Jeffrey eventually needs love.
Jeffrey’s constant surveillance of the store and its employees leads him to form a little crush on Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst), a beleaguered but kind-hearted single mom to two teen girls just doing her best under the dictatorial rule of the store’s Napoleonic manager, Mitch (Peter Dinklage). When Leigh announces her church is hosting a toy-donation drive, Jeffrey leaves the confines of the Toys R Us and seizes the opportunity.
It’s when Jeffrey ventures out into the wider world that “Roofman” wobbles a bit on its parapet. It defies reason even if it’s partially true; the real-life Manchester did, in fact, successfully carry on a double life for a spell, dating a woman named Leigh, going to church, and ingratiating himself with the community he was using as a cover. But “Roofman” takes some liberties with the story, placing Leigh in the Toys R Us and making the otherwise pragmatic woman incredibly incurious about her new beau’s seemingly endless source of income.
Here, Cianfrance’s instincts begin to surface, shifting tones between broad comedy, family drama and existential introspection. “Roofman” can’t quite stay balanced on the tonal tightrope, nor does it seriously grapple with the destabilizing harm Jeffrey’s charm inflicts on every woman with whom he comes into contact. The film, it seems, likes Jeffrey too much to risk souring us on him.
Unlike its protagonist, “Roofman” is a film that leads with a bit too much heart and not quite enough brain. But at least its heart is the right place.
Barbara’s ranking:
2.5/4 stars
