Roofman (2025)

Score: 3 / 5

A criminal with a heart of gold takes center stage in Roofman, biopic of sorts masquerading as a crowd-pleasing comedy. Drastically changing tone for writer/director Derek Cianfrance (The Place Between the Pines, Blue Valentine, The Light Between Oceans), this movie capitalizes on the winning charms of its leading actor, Channing Tatum, doing what he does best. Yet, as fascinating as the real story is, the film consistently skews toward fantasy over reality, choosing to paint the struggles of its titular robber as a desperate lifelong adventure for family and belonging. Rather than diving into what could have been a strange and enlightening character study, Cianfrance pushes us into conventional rom-com beats that, while sweet and often slightly off-key, whitewash the story and ignore its more chilling implications.

Nominally about Jeffrey Manchester, a former Army officer who becomes a gentle and kind robber in order to make a living, the film oddly distances us from knowing his inner life. Tatum's capable performance -- though a far cry from his recent devastating presence in Blink Twice -- cannot rescue the film from a series of unanswered questions posed by itself about him. He's shown to be head over heels in love with his young family, yet he chooses not to provide for them using legal means. On the suggestion of an old military friend (LaKeith Stanfield), Jeff instead uses his training in observation and action to cut holes in the roof of fast food joints, kindly restrain the limited employees opening the store (usually by asking them to get their coats and wait in the freezer until the cops come), and take whatever is in their safe. Even when interviewed by the media, who provide the film's title for their mysteriously gentlemanly criminal, the employees praise Jeff's thoughtful and gentle manner.

Yet it's never clear why he can't hold a job on his own, despite some brief early remarks about American society using and discarding discharged service members. And it's wholly unclear why, despite his obsessive desire to connect with his daughter (almost never his wife or infant twins, mind), he doesn't actually try to be a self-sufficient civilized individual. His most recent crime ends with the police arresting him at his daughter's birthday party, surely traumatizing her, and then he's whisked away to prison with only an occasional afterthought about what he has done to the girl he loves most in the world.

Jeff is described as resourceful and brilliant by other characters, but we see almost none of it. His chameleonic wit and charm disguise him from suspicion, even when he shows up to a church looking (and surely smelling) like the dregs of society. Thankfully, the film depicts the church he finds as truly good Samaritans, lovely people led by Ben Mendelsohn and Uzo Aduba (it's an aggressively weird pairing, but they uplift the middle of this film in a necessary way). They warmly accept him as he is and help provide for him.

The problem is that he's also lying to them. He's living in a hidden space in a Toys R Us store, bathing in the employee bathroom sink, eating candy, and acting a fool in the aisles by night. He fixates on the cruel and stupid manager, Peter Dinklage, and a beautiful young woman and mother who recently went through a divorce. Kirsten Dunst's presence as Leigh is an unexpected but heartfelt delivery of a salient millennial crisis right now, when what we were promised by those we love -- and society in general -- has been broken and we're left to pick up the pieces. Her pathos is emphasized when Jeff, who followed her to the church, meets her and she clearly wants to try dating again. But money is an issue, as are her teenage daughters; would a single man be interested in a quiet pizza night at home with mother and daughters? Maybe not every man, but one who's functionally starving, desperate for family time, and eager to escape the prison he's built for himself will absolutely be there.

And he goes overboard. I don't want to spoil any more, but Jeff's personality quirks don't stop when he finds love. He's a great influence on the girls, who he shockingly quickly befriends, yet his behavior is peripatetic, somewhat unpredictable, and almost always materialistic. At one point, Leigh literally tells him point blank that they just want him to be with them, yet he continues to throw money and toys and flowers and candy and balloons and even a damn car at them. Meanwhile, he gets paranoid about the unsustainable life he's eked out and sure that someone will identify him, so he reaches out again to his army friend, wanting to pay an exorbitant amount for a new identity and a one-way ticket to a country without extradition. These things don't add up coherently, and while that might be the point, it makes Jeff as presented in the film to be something like a sociopath, whose integrity is nonexistent despite his nonviolent crimes. He's going to devastate the people he claims to love, and he does it both willingly and seemingly intentionally. I don't get it. And that's not even approaching the topic of his criminal compulsions, which to be rationalized in our minds does not match with the character we see here.

It's a fun enough film, and really sickly sweet, until it isn't. And I was most struck with its hypocrisy late in the film, when I wondered how this charming man might have fared, especially in the deep South of the film's setting, had he been non-white. Or unattractive. Why is it that this guy, who has been convicted of many crimes and sentenced to several decades in prison, is afforded the benefit of our romantic and humorous affections whereas so many other incarcerated men are not? Is it by nature of his wacky escapades and bizarre life's work? Then why the overwhelming focus on his romantic life and not on his psychological state, the institutional realities that compel him to commit crimes, or the material impacts of his frankly idiotic financial and relational decisions? I want to know why he thought endless consumerism would make him a good father, a good husband, a good man. I want to know why he seeks to give women around him a life he thinks they deserve rather than honoring what they say they need from him. I want to know what he thinks of the ways veterans are treated and how and why he so terribly chose anarchy in an effort to make a better life, especially in the context of a distinctly charitable church network. There's a lot of charm in Roofman, to be sure, but there's a dispiriting lack of curiosity, turning what should be a humanist saga into a simplistic and generic tangent.