Roofman: When Truth Is Stranger, and Perhaps Less Chipper, Than Fiction

By Liz Braun

Rating: B

After he escaped from prison in 2004, armed robber Jeffrey Manchester holed up at an abandoned electronics store in a Charlotte, North Carolina strip mall. He broke into an adjoining Toys R Us and stole a variety of items he could use or sell and successfully hid out in his strange, retail lair. He evaded authorities for months.

Once Manchester got lonely enough, he ventured across the road to the Crossroads Church. There he met and fell in love with a woman named Leigh Wainscott, a divorcee with three children (though she is depicted in the film with just two).

Ladies love outlaws, perhaps, but Manchester was consistently described by his robbery victims as a kind and polite individual, and Wainscott (and her kids) embraced Manchester. There was no way of knowing he was a wanted man.

Eventually, they found out.

Manchester’s bizarre true story has become Roofman, a movie with Channing Tatum as the good-hearted thief and Kirsten Dunst as the church lady who wins his heart. It’s an engaging enough movie, an interesting combo of crime drama, love story, and comedy. The cast includes Peter Dinklage as the mean-spirited Toys R Us manager, plus Ben Mendelsohn, LaKeith Stanfield, and Juno Temple.

Several people from the real-life events — including Leigh Wainscott, Sgt. Katherine Scheimreif, who arrested Manchester in 1999 and Pastor Ron Smith, who ran the Crossroads Church — have brief cameos in Roofman as background characters.

The film is poignant and also very funny. It's directed by Derek Cianfrance and co-written by Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn. The performances are uniformly good — Dunst is particularly appealing — but there’s something unsatisfactory about the storytelling.

The issue for this viewer was not learning nearly enough about Jeffrey Manchester or what made him tick. The details of his life on the lam are really interesting, and he is obviously intelligent, but just how and why he undertook a life of crime isn’t looked at too closely and that’s a pity. Who is this guy, exactly?

Maybe expectations for Roofman were too high going in — Cianfrance (The Place Beyond The Pines; Blue Valentine) is a celebrated director, and this is his first film in several years. And it was interesting to anticipate how he would work with the consistently underrated Tatum.

Roofman is solid entertainment, make no mistake, and it’s good. But some of us wanted it to be great.

Roofman. Directed by Derek Cianfrance, co-written by Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn. Starring Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, Peter Dinklage, Ben Mendelsohn, LaKeith Stanfield, and Juno Temple. In theatres October 10.