Derek Cianfrance’s based-on-true-life caper Roofman feels like a mainstream studio movie from 10 or 15 years ago, and that’s a good thing. Before the streaming revolution began, moviegoers were always on the lookout for a satisfying Saturday-night date movie, and Roofman ticks many of the boxes: It’s got appealing stars, one of whom can and does dance; it’s built around a sweet romance that takes off against all odds; and it’s about breaking the law and getting away with it, at least for a time, which makes for rebellious good fun. The trailer for Roofman makes the movie look like a buoyant romantic comedy, and that’s more than halfway accurate.[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]But about two-thirds of the way through, Roofman makes a quiet, almost imperceptible shift toward melancholy. In the past 10 years or so, we’ve been talking a lot about a crisis of masculinity in American culture, though no one has been able to define exactly what that means. Boys are said to feel less confident than their girl peers and aren’t doing as well in school. Grown men feel threatened and unsure, both in the workplace and outside it. Roofman doesn’t deal directly with those issues, but like the signature films Cianfrance made in the early 2000s, Blue Valentine (2010) and The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), it’s keyed into the ways some men feel they can never measure up, particularly when it comes to family life: they yearn for it, idealizing it maybe specifically because they’re incapable of hanging onto it. Roofman is a comedy until it isn’t, the story of a man who, by making what he calls a series of “bad choices,” is banished from family life—the thing he most desires—not once but twice.Channing Tatum plays Jeffrey Manchester, a onetime soldier who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for robbing several McDonald’s restaurants, only to escape in 2004 in the hopes of starting a new life. Manchester managed to live for six months, undetected, in a Charlotte, N.C., Toys”R”Us store. He cannily figured out ways to come and go from his makeshift lair, and even began dating a local single mom, Leigh Wainscott, played in the film by Kirsten Dunst. Roofman—the movie’s title comes from the nickname given to Manchester, who’d gained entrance to the establishments he’d robbed by drilling through their roofs—sees the outlandish humor in Manchester’s survival tactics, which include maintaining a steady diet of baby food and peanut M&Ms, the only victuals he could scrounge up within the walls of his new de facto prison. And his courtship of Leigh, whom he meets at a local church, has a wholesome sweetness. Manchester makes gifts of (stolen) toys and video games to her kids, and he treats her with a kind of goofy, homespun gallantry.Tatum knows exactly how to play this kind of role. Leigh works in the Toys”R”Us where Manchester is hiding out. Partly out of boredom and partly to make sure no one cottons to his presence, he’s rigged up a monitor to watch the goings-on in the store during the day: he can see Leigh as she goes about her workday, but he can’t talk to her. That changes when he learns there’s a Christmas toy drive at her church. The meanie store manager (played, with cartoony hard-ass villainy, by Peter Dinklage) refuses to make a donation, so Manchester gathers a bagful of (stolen) toys and brings them over to the church himself. The nice church ladies eagerly accept him: when they ask for his name, he blurts out “John Zorn.” (This will be hilarious to anyone familiar with the respected avant-garde saxophonist and composer of the same name, a fixture of the 1970s downtown New York music scene.) He tells them he does secret government work. They invite him to a singles brunch at the local Red Lobster, which turns out to be a tableful of hopeful single women, all in middle age, including Leigh. He flatters them as he takes his seat at the head of the table: “I thought this was a singles brunch, not a supermodels brunch!” Tatum has the face, sunny as a cornfield, of a guy who would never snow you, which is why he’s the perfect choice to play a guy who skates by on nothing but lies and deception.You do see where he’s coming from. The first section of the movie shows how Manchester lost his first family, consisting of a wife, infant twins, and an eight-year-old daughter he adores. In the opening scene, he struggles to give his daughter, six at the time, the birthday party she deserves—since getting out of the service, he just hasn’t been able to make his life work. His closest friend, Steve (LaKeith Stanfield), an old army buddy, points out something he already knows: that he’s acutely observant about the way things work, picking up on details others can’t see. That’s how he starts robbing McDonald’s restaurants, though he makes it a point to be nice about it: before he locks a group of trembling Mickey Dee’s employees in a cold-storage locker, he gives one of them (played by Wes Anderson favorite Tony Revolori), dressed only in short sleeves, his own coat.Manchester keeps insisting through the movie that he’s a nice guy, and mostly, he is. He cares about people; he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. But Tatum makes us see the cracks in Manchester’s thinking—at the root of his behavior is a particularly selfish kind of deception. There are lots of sequences of Tatum’s Manchester dancing—occasionally in the buff—through the deserted nighttime aisles of that Toys”R”Us Store. (If we can’t see Tatum cast in a musical, this will have to be the next best thing.) But Tatum is more than just your garden-variety charmer. Occasionally, you catch a chilly vacancy in his eyes, and you understand that Manchester believes that because he deserves happiness, he can just take it. His impulses aren’t pure; they amount to a kind of entitlement. And you feel sympathy for him even so.That’s the complex emotional push-pull that makes Roofman work. Dunst’s presence is key here. In a pivotal scene, Leigh’s cheerful radiance—her joy after having finally landed what she thinks is a nice guy—gives way to a cloud cover of doubt and suspicion; Dunst plays the scene as subtly as if, in the moment, she were watching the moon drift away forever. Roofman is partly a lark: it’s fun to watch a clever, likable guy like Tatum’s Manchester beat the system. But everything Manchester does is linked to his warped sense of what makes a man a man. He even says aloud, more than once, that he recognizes his big mistake: he tried to give his “families” everything money could buy, when all they really wanted was him. He triumphed in beating the system for a time. But the truly unachievable task was outrunning himself.