How many more movies do we need to prove that Channing Tatum is the best everyman of his generation? His latest effort in Derek Cianfrance’s true crime comedy Roofman finds him escaping police, pounding M&Ms, and running naked through a children’s department store.
But the film, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, also returns him to what he shines at: a boundlessly charismatic man trying (and often failing) to do his best, whose deep melancholy is barely hidden behind Tatum’s sly smile. It’s an unexpectedly harmonious pairing of director and actor, with Tatum delivering one of his best performances.
Roofman tells the wild true story of Jeffrey Manchester (Tatum), who earned the titular moniker after getting busted for an extended string of McDonald’s robberies by coming in through the roof.
After receiving a 45-year sentence in 2000, Manchester broke out of jail and hid out for nearly six months in a North Carolina Toys “R” Us. Stepping out of hiding, he falls for newly divorced mother Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), which emboldens him to present as the dependable man that his life of crime would otherwise never allow. It’s a true crime saga about a person at odds with his true nature, all told with baked-in branding nostalgia for a dead era.
But along with Blockbuster signs and Tickle-Me-Elmo sight gags, director Cianfrance serves us the kind of flawed, masculine character study that is his specialty. The director broke out with the troubled marital drama Blue Valentine and followed it with the ambitious The Place Beyond the Pines, a divisive opus about paternal legacy. Typically bringing a sense of epicness to intimate tales of masculinity (see also: his underseen masterful HBO miniseries I Know This Much is True), Cianfrance tackles his first comedy by scaling back and playing loose.
While Roofman is a tonal pivot away from darker material that still doesn’t betray any of the director’s sensibilities. This is what a Cianfrance crowdpleaser looks like, bittersweet but never punishing.
Jeffrey is almost the quintessential Cianfrancan character: He wants things that are often at odds with each other, compulsively unable to act as he should. He is another of Cianfrance’s absent or maladjusted fathers that are self-aware of their failures but powerless to stop themselves. As Jeffrey bounds like a manchild throughout the empty children’s megastore in his underwear, he becomes a bawdy representation of the Toys “R” Us “I don’t want to grow up” mantra, escaping responsibility by making this playground his domain. By night, he sleeps in Spider-Man sheets.
As Jeffrey enters Leigh’s life under an assumed identity, he builds himself into the family man he already failed to be. It’s playing dress-up and even though he knows it can’t last forever, he’s as powerlessly drawn to playing this role as he is to compulsive criminal activity.
Here Cianfrance is blessed not only with tremendous chemistry between Tatum and Dunst, but with his razor sharp insight into the mind of men with a spiritual broken wing. Jeffrey’s willingness to commit crimes he will never get away with becomes intertwined with committing to a relationship that’s equally doomed. As Jeffrey flies closer and closer to the deception sun, Tatum maintains his deeply watchable humanity.
Opposite a stacked supporting ensemble that boasts Lakeith Stanfield, Uzo Aduba, Juno Temple, and Peter Dinklage (none of them with much to do), the always stellar Dunst finds depth despite her underwritten role. She is at home in Cianfrance’s grounded emotional truth, but not given much complexity to play until the film’s final gracefully raw scenes. Like Pines before it, Roofman unfortunately shows Cianfrance struggling to grant as much inner life to his female characters as the men at the center.
But Roofman is at its best as a showcase for Tatum at the top of his game. This performance feels like striking a midpoint between his two greatest performances: the freewheeling upbeat charisma of the Magic Mike franchise and the hardened pathos of Foxcatcher. For both of those roles, the actor was largely either overlooked or written off as a simple beefcake. Let’s not do that again. Channing Tatum is a body and soul actor.
Tatum brilliantly inhabits Jeffrey’s contradictions, landing himself as comfortably in Cianfrance’s stable of world weary and imperfect men as Ryan Gosling memorably was. It’s a role that the underrated actor is uniquely tailor-made for, relying heavily not only on his natural magnetism but also his ability to make us care about deeply flawed men. Not many contemporary actors can nail the film’s tricky balance between borderline slapstick and pathology as Tatum does here.
As light on his feet Tatum can be when Jeffrey doles out his innate charm and goodness to self-serving ends, what haunts the movie is the actor’s vulnerability. Roofman, as with the best of his work, is unlocked in how he holds his gaze and his body–Tatum’s slightest hint of dejection or withholding cuts straight to the heart.
As escape becomes both just on the horizon and an impossible leap, Tatum allows the audience to see the weight of Jeffrey’s disappointment in himself and his helplessness. It’s a delicate balance that he nevertheless makes look effortless and soulfully complete. In Tatum’s hands, Jeffrey isn’t even an anti-hero, he’s just someone painfully and hilariously their own worst enemy.
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