Channing Tatum takes a trip down the weirdest lane of his career with Roofman, a fact-based comedy from Derek Cianfrance that plays with viewer sympathies like a pickpocket. Sold as a frothy caper, the movie is in fact a bristly morality play wrapped up in rom-com rhythms, posing questions about how much charisma can launder crime — and whether it should be forgiven.
A stranger-than-fiction premise
Loosely based on the real-life Jeffrey Manchester, known as “Roofman” in news stories of his era for breaking and entering through business ceilings, the story follows a polite stickup guy who takes pride in being polite.
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In the movie’s set-piece opening, Tatum’s Jeffrey blithely rounds up fast-food staffers like they’re trouble-prone guests of honor, concerned only with their comfort as he waves a gun. The gag lands—and instantly curdles. Cianfrance plants a prickly question: Does skirting crudeness minimize damage or merely hide it?
Following a cagey escape from prison, Jeffrey holes up at a big-box toy store and reimagines himself as “John Zorn,” sliding into an existence of codependence with churchgoing locals.
Enter Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst), a single mother whose reluctant warmth provides the movie with its rom-com sheen. Their courtship is breezy and lightly funny, but the tension never dissipates: every sweet gesture is based on a lie, every close call raises the dread.
Casting that weaponizes charm
The figure of Tatum himself, impish yet brawny, becomes the film’s sharpest weapon. He leans into slapstick and easy soft-shoes, then lets the anxiety come in at the edges — particularly as Jeffrey rationalizes thefts and half-truths as “doing right by family.” Dunst parries with flinty decency; her Leigh is no chump, only someone starving to make a meal out of an honest man. Together, they create a relationship that feels lived-in, which is why the deception stings all the more.
The cast is shrewd: Lakeith Stanfield exudes as his boy, an old acolyte who lures Jeffrey back into the game; Peter Dinklage, craggy with suspicion, puts the manager of a toy store on their case; Ben Mendelsohn and Uzo Aduba offer communal warmth as religious leaders whose generosity Jeffrey is happy to prey upon. It’s not just colorful but a bit of conscience that the film keeps going to like a touchstone.
Cianfrance vs. the con-man myth
Known for bruising dramas like “Blue Valentine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” Cianfrance isn’t about to make another worshipful grifter tale. He salutes the canon — Catch Me If You Can, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and the wry tradition of heist filmmaking that prizes nimbleness over morality — then inverts it. Voiceover goes slippery, jokes land with a thud of accountability, and the camera lingers on collateral damage that’s normally cropped out of capers.
The end-credit snippets of the people who knew the real “John Zorn” muddy that takeaway, muddying sin and crime and nudging this film from redemption arc to forgiveness parable.
“The ambiguity itself accords with what we know,” as social-psychology research shows, about being under the sway of the halo effect and moral licensing, which demonstrate how likability clouds judgment. It’s also a sharp departure from other true-crime comedies: I, Tonya or The Informant! —where satire has helped to hold viewers at a more comfortable remove.
Does it succeed as a comedy?
Roofman is, mostly, a dare. The first half is disarming in its sweetness; the back half yanks the rug out with a choice that’s neither clever nor kind. The tonal swing is designed to be jolting, though the climax feels almost like a reprieve — caught between indictment and empathy. Some will find that a muddle; others will see a filmmaker refusing to lay an easy moral ledger in our laps.
The backdrop adds unnerving realism. Reportedly as much as 90% of them target low-wage workplaces; the human cost does not typically make headlines, nor are cash register and and deposit money amounts high enough to warrant focusing on them. Roofman holds on to that, even as it goes for laughs, and the pressure is deliciously uncomfortable. Industry trackers like Nielsen and Parrot Analytics have observed that tastes are shifting toward hybrid true-crime stories, but good will among an audience dissipates quickly when a narrative feels as if it’s trivializing the victims — something this film grapples with right out in the open.
Bottom line
Roofman is not the fizzy caper its sunny marketing would have you believe. It’s a prickly, occasionally exasperating examination of charm as camouflage, propelled by a canny Channing Tatum turn and a grounded, openhearted Kirsten Dunst. The supporting cast provides texture, and Cianfrance purposefully changes genres, if unevenly. If you want sanitized chuckles and a rogue to cheer for, look elsewhere. If you’re in the mood for a comedy that biteth the hand that feedeth it, here’s your weird true story.