Roofman

 

Derek Cianfrance hasn't directed a lot of feature pictures, but he has a sure touch with stories about human imperfection.

I loved both The Place Beyond the Pines (2013) and Blue Valentine (2011), two beautifully unsettling films that starred Ryan Gosling, an apparent Cianfrance muse and creative collaborator, in the roles of damaged men making bad decisions and the women who love them.

The director's latest picture, Roofman, stars Channing Tatum in the true story of Jeff, a handsome and charming but emotionally and financially hobbled veteran in North Carolina, whose inability to provide for his family leads him to burglarize McDonald's restaurants after dark.

After a string of thefts, Jeff is caught by the police and imprisoned. He escapes, learns his wife has filed for divorce and forbids him talking to his children. He takes on a new name, and while on the run, finds shelter in the storage space of a Toys R Us in Charlotte.

He holes up for months, monitoring the doings of staff members, especially the prickly store manager Mitch (Peter Dinklage) and the comely single-mother Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), bathing in the restroom, eating nothing but baby food and chocolate candy.

Through a series of events, Jeff meets Leigh at her church, where he tells everyone he's a government agent on a secret assignment in the city. He needs to keep up this lie until he can get help from a former Army buddy Steve (Lakeith Stanfield) and his girlfriend Michelle (Juno Temple of Ted Lasso) to create new papers so that he can move on with his life.

This presents Jeff with a quandary: he's grown attached to Leigh and her daughters (Lily Collias and Kennedy Moyer) and doesn't want to leave them, but he realizes staying would only lead to his being caught. He makes another series of bad decisions that leads to a stand-off with police and draws the curtain down on his charade.

Tatum and Dunst have an easy rapport so their attraction seems authentic, despite the lunacy of this unlikely adventure. Tatum's bucketfuls of charisma make Jeff an appealing but frustrating mix of survival genius and lunkhead. Still, it's a winning combination that will probably ring true for many audience members who have known a few charming liars in their time and maybe dated a few.