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You couldn’t accuse Jeffrey Manchester of being inconsiderate or impolite. Sure, the former member of the U.S. Army’s 82nd airborne division had fallen on hard times in terms of steady employment, and when you need to provide for your family, you do what you have to do. In Manchester’s case, that meant climbing on to the roofs of local fast food joints in the greater North Carolina area, using his military skills to bust into the place, and proceed to empty the safe once the staff shows up for the morning shift. When he happens to hit a McDonalds and is ushering the workers into the freezer before his getaway, however, this masked man notices the manager hasn’t brought a coat. He offers the man his own bulky outerwear. Manchester would hate for the poor guy to catch cold. Just because he’s a criminal doesn’t mean he’s unconcerned about the welfare of his fellow citizens.
Even if you don’t know this real-life tale, you might guess what happens next. Manchester gets caught, and is sentenced to 45 years in the state penitentiary. Roughly four years into his bid, he releases himself on his recognizance — Jeffrey felt the institution no longer had anything to offer him — by stowing away in the bottom of a delivery truck. A fellow soldier from his old regiment can help him flee the country; he just has to wait until his friend returns from overseas. And here’s the point where things take a rather more unexpected turn. In need of a place to hide out, Manchester sneaks into a Toys R’ Us in Charlotte. After closing time, he spies an area under construction. There’s a gap between the enclosure and wall. This is the place that Manchester calls home for the next six months, leaving occasionally to sell video games for cash, go to church, and romance a local single mother named Leigh Wainscott. No one will suspect he’s a fugitive from the law.
It’s a story far, far stranger than fiction — though not so weird that you couldn’t turn it into a true-crime rom-com. Taking its title from the character’s media-given nickname, Roofman presents Manchester as a genuinely lovable fuck-up, the kind of shaggy-dog scammer that makes you believe he’s desperate enough to rob 45 (!) fast food restaurants over a two-year period and decent enough to literally give someone the coat off his back. Most people would have pitched this as a pathological case study or a parable for the early 21st century blues, presenting this semi-Robin Hood figure as a folk hero stickin’ it to the man. In writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s hands, it’s a tale of cracked genius that stole not just corporate profits but hearts. And that’s where Channing Tatum comes in.
The 45-year-old actor has always projected a sort of likable, hunky lunkhead persona, giving the movies their equivalent of the campus jock that secretly had a sly sense of self-deprecating humor and theater-department chops. Tatum knows how to wield that mix well, and has been unafraid to undercut his leading-man bona fides even when proving his eight-figure worth; name another modern-day performer who could sell not one but two 21 Jump Street comedies, plausibly execute an old-school Gene Kelly number when needed and feel comfortable subverting his nice-guy sex symbol vibe for something like Blink Twice. Frankly, we’re not sure even the Singin’ in the Rain legend could have pulled off the “Pony” dance with such effective bump-and-grind panache, either.
Roofman is definitely a throwback to the sort of jagged character studies of the late 1970s that’s also balancing a feel-good early 1980s vibe, full of the lived-in feel that the Blue Valentine and Place Beyond the Pines filmmaker specializes in. (You just don’t expect such uplift from Cianfrance, who usually tends to favor a more cinéma du slit your wrists approach.) But the movie also knows what it’s got in terms of a star presence, and is very much designed to highlight a full Channing Tatum Charm Offensive. Manchester is a canny survivor, able to adapt to both new environments and adopt winning personality traits tailored to whatever crowd he’s talking to. He’s also a bit of an arrested adolescent with a try-hard complex, and Tatum plays up a hyper, puppyish energy that occasionally pushes the please-love-me meter in to the red. Watch him pull a Risky Business-style slide in the toystore aisles after hours before humping an inflatable dinosaur, or turn an uncomfortable “singles event” full of women into a flirty gabfest, and you start to feel like the character is eclipsed by someone else’s winky, “ain’t I a stinker?” energy. Some seriously stock voiceover tracks, while filling in some interior-monologue gaps, don’t help.
Yet those setbacks feel minor compared to everything that Tatum is bringing to the party in terms of humanizing someone who might have come off as a sociopath on the page. And at its best, Roofman gives you a portrait of someone trying to find happiness while skipping through a minefield of self-administered bad choices. When the film simply lets Tatum give you action as character, as during the prison break sequence — or a sizing up and taming of his new Toys R’ Us homestead, which plays out like one part silent comedy and one part Rififi redo — it’s extremely good. And when the narrative begins to focus more on the relationship between Manchester and Leigh Wainscott, it’s even better. Dunst, we should note, is the second smart casting coup the film pulls off. She’s always the sort of reliable screen performer who knows how to suggest seismic waves breaking under the surface. But her reactions and her subtle shifts of mood as the new man enters her life, and tries to win over her two daughters, help ground things in a way that enhances her scene partner’s work and the scenario itself. Her inability to be anything less than authentic bleeds over into the film as a whole.
Cianfrance has assembled a deep bench around these two, with Peter Dinklage as a tyrant of a Toys R’ Us boss, Ben Mendelsohn and Uzo Aduba as the couple that welcome Manchester into their church, Lakeith Stanfield as his army pal, Juno Temple as his pal’s girlfriend, and Good One‘s breakout Lily Collias as Leigh’s mercurial teenage daughter. But even as the movie underlines the necessity of community fellowship in this on-the-run felon’s life, Roofman boils it down to a simple dilemma: He’s finally found what he was looking for. Should he stay or should he go? History has already rendered its judgment. Tatum and Dunst make you feel the stakes nonetheless.
So yes, attention all shoppers: show up for The Tatum Show, take in how the actual North Carolina landscapes and strip malls (and locals; Cianfrance cast a lot of Charlotte residents, several of whom were directly in Manchester’s orbit and play themselves) add a genuine sense of place, and follow along as the two above-the-title names engage in a sort of bizarre love triangle with a recreated Toys R’ Us. It’s a movie that stumbles every so often, overplays its hand numerous time, and relies on an oddball true-story premise and 1000-watt star power to pave over some of the rougher spots. It would also give you its coat if you needed it without asking, and the big takeaway from Roofman, we’d argue, is its emphasis not on sympathy for the “devil” here but a palpable sense of empathy for everyone involved. Given the scarcity of this particular quality today, that’s no small feat.
