Everybody's all-American: "Roofman"

Roofman constitutes a change of pace for writer-director Derek Cianfrance, hitherto a purveyor of varyingly agonised relationship dramas (2010's Blue Valentine, 2012's The Place Beyond the Pines, 2016's The Light Between Oceans). For all the acclaim those modern melodramas attracted, there may well be less money in them than in a goofy, all-American true-crime story such as this, especially when said crime story is repurposed as a full-on charm offensive. The story, which dates from 2004, concerns one Jeffery Manchester, a cashstrapped Army vet introduced literally on a roof: that of the latest McDonald's he's burrowed into in order to liberate its abundant petty cash. A brisk flashback brings us up to speed on how this latter-day outlaw got here, before Cianfrance cracks on with recreating what happened next - in short order, Jeff's arrest at his own daughter's sixth birthday party, a prison break, and a large-scale manhunt, during which Manchester holed up for several months in the eaves of his nearest Toys 'R' Us. If this clown needed excuses making for him, the film has them in spades. First and foremost, he's played by Channing Tatum, the current cinema's #1 lovable oik; early on, we see Jeff offer his coat to one of the McDonald's employees he's about to shut inside the branch's meat fridge. But it's really the movie's two branded reference points - the burger joint and the spacious palace of childhood dreams - which best allow us to get a handle on the protagonist. Cianfrance frames Jeff Manchester as a bigger than average kid, a well-meaning but scrabbling dad, trapped within a system that doesn't pay him enough to afford the things he wants for him and his loved ones. The underlying assumption is that you and I may well know someone like this.

In his earlier films - particularly his opening one-two - Cianfrance could be observed straining for depth and weight, for seriousness and significance. Roofman bears out the advantages of pairing the same sensibility with something lighter in tone: they feel obliged to ground their material, to bulk it out and prevent it from flying away like a stray novelty balloon. So it is here: in the opening half-hour, we get a suggestive sketch of a straitened blue-collar community, an inventive, more than plausible breakout, and a sequence in which Jeff overrides the store's motion sensors and security cameras and starts to get the lay of his new, somewhat unreal kingdom. The story is goofy - a Dog Day Afternoon on rollerskates - but the storytelling is rarely other than considered. So you sit back and relax, freed up to enjoy the montage in which Jeff realises that, after hours, he essentially has every commercially available toy in the continental United States at his disposal; and the sequence in which he improvises rudimentary laundry arrangements; and the passage which sees Jeff go from passive intruder-observer to actively intervening in Toys 'R' Us store and personnel policy; and then the character's realisation that even this most colourful and well-stocked of capitalist utopias - even with all the M&Ms a man might eat to stay awake through the wee small hours - is, in fact, its own form of prison. Imagine having all the toys in the western world at your disposal, and being unable to give them to your daughter without risking recapture. It's a superficially goofy story, then, but it has hidden pockets of depth - like the nooks into which Jeff has to repeatedly curl himself - and resonances all the way down.

One potential issue is that we, too, might have found ourselves holed up and restless, but Cianfrance keeps looking beyond his core story to find inviting, warming bubbles of everyday American life. Some of these (a singles dinner at a Red Lobster, perhaps) are almost certainly invention, part of the film's overall project of romanticisation, but - whatever - Roofman remains good company for a couple of hours, even when it's just the leading man poking around on his lonesome. Equal parts goofus and gallant, Tatum plays Jeff as someone who's both determined and practical enough to live off-grid for half a year, but who also has to try and keep his story straight whenever he's confronted by the outside world. You could argue the role isn't that great a stretch - Tatum has rehearsed similar lunks in Magic Mike, Logan Lucky and less alliterative, non-Soderbergh projects besides - but somehow the actor proves even more integral to Roofman's peculiar charms: he finds real pathos in the sight of a grown man curling up under Spider-Man bedsheets, and the contours of his face readjust in the film's second half. Sloughing off an initial, appealing toplayer of puppy fat as starvation kicks in, Tatum re-emerges as closer to the hardened career criminal De Niro played in Heat, some indicator of the choice Jeff will eventually have to make. (He gets taut as the movie does.) This is a performance to banish any remaining doubts one may have about this actor's status as a fully-fledged leading man: one marker of Tatum's achievement is that it's only on the way out that you realise that, like everybody else on screen, you too have been charmed by a character who's basically a con artist.

That everybody else is noteworthy in itself. One of this script's great pleasures is that it keeps wriggling away from the situation at the Toys 'R' Us, and forcing Jeff into quasi-love triangles: first with Kirsten Dunst as the brassy blonde shelfstacker he falls for (again: not the biggest stretch for this performer, but nobody plays these roles better) and Peter Dinklage as her pernickety, suspicious boss; later, with best friend LaKeith Stanfield and his beauty-salon squeeze Juno Temple; even, in passing, with pastor Ben Mendelsohn and wife Uzo Aduba. No man can be an island when you're this charming. (And Cianfrance has realised another way to bulk this scenario out is with good actors, who can transform a few lines here and there into a way of life, a philosophy, maybe even an escape route.) Working with cinematographer Andrij Parekh, Cianfrance gives the film a nice, crisply unfussy autumnal look - it's perfect that Jeff should find himself increasingly exposed as the leaves start to fall from the trees, and you do fear he wouldn't survive an especially chill winter - and engineers one of the year's funniest sight gags (involving two adjacent buildings) through framing alone. There's one image towards the end that seems on-the-nose, unnecessary underlining, and we don't really need the potted biography of Jeff Manchester provided in the end credits, which struck me as letting a bit too much light in on Hollywood magic. The good news, though - and Roofman is, on the whole, very good news - is that there is still magic here, not least in witnessing that earlier strain in Cianfrance's cinema finally conjured out of sight. Roofman remains a goofy story, but it's also supremely well told.

Roofman is now playing in cinemas nationwide.