Roofman Review: Channing Tatum Charms In Bittersweet True Crime Story [TIFF 2025]

Derek Cianfrance is known for making sad movies like “Blue Valentine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” so it came as a surprise to see “Roofman,” his first new feature in eight years, being sold as a mainstream crowd-pleasing comedy. How would the director adjust to such a major gear shift? Now that “Roofman” has premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, it turns out that Cianfrance didn’t have to stretch too far beyond his comfort zone. This is a surprisingly sad movie — just one that also happens to be funny.

Based on a true story, “Roofman” stars Channing Tatum as Jeffrey Manchester, a poor divorced veteran whose old army buddy Steve (LaKeith Stanfield) describes him as the “smartest dumb” person. Jeff’s unable to get a job, but his “superpowers” of observation allow him to pull off a scheme to escape poverty by sneaking into McDonald’s restaurants from the roof and robbing them (while being very polite to their workers while doing so, mind you). When he gets caught and sentenced to 45 years in prison, he breaks out and hides inside the wall of a Toys “R” Us, where he lives off Peanut M&Ms and spies on the employees with baby monitors.

When one of the Toys “R” Us employees, Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst), fails to convince her stingy manager Mitch (Peter Dinklage) to donate some of the store’s toys to her church’s charity drive, Jeff takes it upon himself to “donate” those toys instead. Coming up with the new persona of top-secret government agent “John Zorn” in order to interact with the outside world for the first time in years, Jeff is drawn into the community of Leigh’s church — and toward a relationship with Leigh herself.

As a crazy true crime story about a charismatic yet ethically dubious protagonist that turns into a rom-com in the second act, the recent movie that “Roofman” most immediately brings to mind is Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man.” “Hit Man,” however, played fast and loose with the truthfulness of its telling, openly breaking reality for the sake of entertainment. “Roofman,” in contrast, seems to stick pretty faithfully to what actually happened, with the humor emerging from how ridiculous what actually happened was. There are some omissions and timeline changes (I don’t think “Naruto” hoodies had hit American stores in 2004), but the biggest artistic license might be that the real Jeffrey Manchester did not look like Channing Tatum — the “photos/video of the real people” part of the credits is funny in just how big a Hollywood glow-up everyone got.

Tatum’s talents are perfectly suited for the part onscreen. You buy Jeff as a gifted soldier, a buffoonish himbo, and a sexy dad so non-toxic in his masculinity that Leigh initially assumes he’s gay, because, well, that’s just a description of Tatum’s whole screen persona, give or take a Gambit. He even gets to dance a bit, and has a nude scene that’s both a great bit of slapstick and something certain segments of the audience will want to carefully freeze-frame for certain reasons. He’s funny and appealing, but also carries the sadness that Jeff’s story ultimately leaves the viewer with.

With a great ensemble of actors all around, Kirsten Dunst is a particular standout as Leigh, the cheerful down-to-Earth single mom charmed and tricked by Jeff. Their relationship is his hope at some sort of normality amidst his decidedly not normal life, and you want good things for both of them together. The tragedy is that Jeff’s emphasis on “things” continues to put him at further and further risk of being caught. He tries to steal-slash-gift his way into the approval of Leigh’s daughters — an emotional substitute for the daughter he first stole for but can no longer speak to — even when his personality could do the trick without showers of presents. People will have different opinions on the line between which of his crimes could be considered tragic necessities for him to be presentable at all versus which ones are just ridiculous excess.

Where “Roofman” could have gone further is in interrogating the culture that makes it so difficult for people in Jeff’s situation to make an honest living while also encouraging the sort of greed and materialism that leads to dishonest livings. The opening exposition explaining how Jeff fell into crime is arguably critique enough for what the film wants to accomplish, and given Jeff’s choices are so unique, it’s understandable why the emphasis of the film’s moralistic final act is more on his own choices and personal responsibility rather than broader systemic factors. Even so, it feels like more of that systemic critique could have been the thing that boosted this from merely a good film to a great one.

To compare with another film I saw this year at the Toronto International Film Festival, “No Other Choice” (directed by Park Chan-wook, the man behind the cult classic “Oldboy”) is another tragicomic crime movie about a financially struggling man enacting baffling schemes to support his family. “No Other Choice” goes from merely amusing to astonishing is with its ending, which situates its antihero’s ironic moral karma inside a poetically rage-inducing condemnation of the forces that create such criminals in the first place. This isn’t the fairest direct comparison since “No Other Choice” is pure fiction where “Roofman” is striving for historical accuracy, but it’s still easy to imagine how “Roofman” could have gone bigger picture. Toys “R” Us, after all, no longer exists as it did in the 2000s because of thieves much more dangerous and facing far fewer consequences than the Roofman.

“Roofman” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It opens in theaters on October 10.