Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst in True-Crime Caper

In films like Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, his TV miniseries I Know This Much Is True and his screenplay work on Sound of Metal, Derek Cianfrance has shown an affinity for moody material, often exploring working-class lives, bruised masculinity and the imperfections of love. The director’s first feature in nine years, Roofman, goes an unexpected route, again touching on those themes but with a delicate tone that makes room for lightness, comedy, romance and quietly searing melancholy.

A true-crime story that’s also a tender character study, the film hands Channing Tatum his most soulful role since Foxcatcher and makes the actor’s not exactly intuitive pairing with Kirsten Dunst a thing of beauty. This is the kind of disarming crowd-pleaser for which cringe-inducing clichés like “it will sneak up and steal your heart” were invented. What’s refreshing about Roofman is that it’s never too aggressive about it. It’s sentimental but sincere.

The same could be said for its protagonist Jeffrey Manchester (Tatum), a convicted robber active in the late ‘90s and again in 2004, who’s a candidate for both cleverest and dumbest career criminal. As a prison guard comments in an interview early on, “He’s a very smart individual, probably genius level. He’s also a complete idiot.” The conundrum Jeff faces repeatedly is how to be a decent guy and do good things for the people he cares about when the only means available to him are crime and deception.

The real Manchester pulled off upwards of 40 robberies by smashing holes in the roofs of food franchise stores during the night, entering and then hiding out until the morning shift clocked on, at which time he would step out with a firearm and usher the employees into the walk-in cool room while he emptied the cash registers. The most unusual part of his spree was not the point of entry but the calm, courteous manner with which he spoke to his victims.

That aspect is demonstrated in an amusing opening scene in which, while hitting one of many McDonald’s locations, he kindly tells the staff to put on their coats before refrigerating them. When the manager stammers that he came to work without a coat, Jeff gives the man his.

The script by Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn never tries to justify Jeff’s criminality, but with pleasing economy, it lays out the reasons he’s been driven to such desperate measures. An army veteran for whom the military had no further use, he returned to North Carolina and has struggled to stay in the lives of his three children, given that their mother (Melonie Diaz) is eager to move on.

His fellow soldier buddy Steve (LaKeith Stanfield), who has his own shady money-making schemes, tells Jeff that his superpower is observation. That plants the idea that careful planning and familiarization with his robbery targets can earn him a lucrative living without hurting anyone. He estimates it will take him 45 McDonald’s heists to get a house and better access to his kids. But that dream appears to die when the “Roofman,” as he’s dubbed in TV news reports, gets apprehended and handed a lengthy prison sentence.

The stranger-than-fiction part of Manchester’s story is the ingenious way he escaped from the correctional facility and managed to live undetected for months in the hidden spaces of a strip-mall Toys “R” Us outlet in Charlotte.

Tatum’s natural charm makes it entirely plausible that Jeff could get on good terms with the prison guards and plot his escape by studying the routines — and the vehicle — of a friendly delivery driver who unwittingly becomes his way out of there. But the arrest, the escape and the subsequent manhunt are more than enough justification for his ex-wife to insist that they cut the cord.

There’s plenty of goofiness and physical comedy in the way Jeff makes a home for himself at the toy store, tucking himself into Spider-Man bedding in his makeshift quarters. He rigs the CCTV cameras, giving him the freedom to roam the aisles at night, subsisting on candy, and installs baby monitors to see what’s going on in the office of flinty store manager Mitch (Peter Dinklage). When he witnesses Mitch’s unsympathetic refusal to give salesclerk Leigh (Dunst) weekends off to spend with her family or to donate even unsellable returned merchandise to her church toy drive, Jeff starts intervening.

The accidental meet-cute circumstances by which he encounters Leigh outside the store, sparking an initially tentative romance between the fugitive and the single mom who knows nothing of his real identity are sweet, but never too cloying.

That’s in large part because even when he’s flirting with a bunch of twinkly-eyed church ladies, there’s no swagger, no slickness or guile, no Ryan Reynolds-brand smugness to Tatum’s characterization. He conveys Jeff’s need to become part of a loving family again with an emotional hunger that ups the poignancy of both the courtship and the promising relationship that evolves.

Dunst’s Leigh is ineffably grounded, burned enough by divorce to be cautious but also sufficiently open-hearted to let Jeff in. The fact that she knows him as John, a government agency employee whose work is bound by confidentiality, is immaterial. With every tiny glance, every flicker of change in her expression, and every unspoken question, the wondrous Dunst conveys the glow of a woman finding warmth, companionship and sex while at the same time making Leigh smart enough eventually to start suspecting there’s something odd going on with John.

But she’s happy to observe John as he slips easily into a father-figure role with her youngest daughter Dee (Kennedy Moyer) and slowly breaks down the defenses of sullen teenager Lindsay, beautifully played by Lily Collias, the gifted discovery from India Donaldson’s underseen gem, Good One. John wins her over in a hilarious scene involving Jimmy O. Yang as a used car salesman.

All this warm and cozy stuff is shadowed by inevitable sadness as Jeff/John starts acknowledging to himself that sooner or later someone’s bound to recognize him if he doesn’t move on.

That necessitates an exit plan involving the crooked business operations of Steve and his girlfriend Michelle (Juno Temple), which is going to cost, and that means one more major robbery. There’s a tragic dimension to the story, but Cianfrance keeps the pathos on the bittersweet side in the affecting final stretch.

Along with lovely work from the two leads, the movie benefits enormously from its deep bench of top-notch supporting players, all of them creating fully fleshed-out characters with relatively little screentime. Stanfield is great as always, a loyal friend to Jeff even if he invariably looks out for No. 1; Temple makes Michelle brassy but good-natured; Dinklage can scratch out appealing qualities in the most unapologetic meanness; Ben Mendelsohn is amusingly cast against type as the relentlessly positive pastor; and Uzo Aduba is a delight as his sunshine-y wife.

Cianfrance and DP Andrij Parekh are clearly going for an unvarnished, vintage look, at the cost of making the movie visually a bit drab, but not so noticeably that it lessens the entertainment value. Sure, you could pick holes in some of the screenplay’s fictional embellishments, but this is such a heartfelt movie with such a humane view of its law-breaking protagonist that it’s both funny and affecting. Just give in to it.