I Know This Much is True is the 2020s best work of narrative art so far, unjustly buried by its just-exactly-wrong release over the course of six weeks in the spring following the onset of COVID-19. It was the latest in Derek Cianfrance’s cycle of kitchen sink miserabilist works, a baton no one in America but he seemed interested in picking up from Mike Leigh. But maybe the pandemic shifted something for Cianfrance, because our undefeated — unchallenged, really — master of middle-class misery has found his sweet tooth: Roofman is a disarmingly earnest and kindhearted story about what it means to be good when flattened by economic fallout. It’s also a keen anthropological excavation, digging up visual codes from a time when movies about normal people hadn’t yet been ruined by Synecdoche, New York, a film that irreparably transformed the low-budget American drama into a playground for stilted auteurist statements. Grounded by an extraordinary sense of time and place, Roofman unpacks a largely neglected stop on our current route to abject decay.
Welcome back to 2004: McDonald’s is shaped like a little castle, pawn shops buy GameCube games at a premium, and Blockbuster is still in business. Smashing a human-sized hole into the ceilings of these establishments is Jeff, an unemployed Afghanistan vet and father who robbing is robbing these businesses blind in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. Jeff has a good eye for routines, but he lacks the cold-blooded mettle required of a successful criminal. Early in the film, he lands in jail, only to escape and seek refuge inside a Toys “R” Us after being told to sit tight by the friend who has the means to help him escape the country for good. He quickly grows bored and begins subtly inserting himself into the lives of those who work at the store.
With some distance, Jeff examines, and repairs, some of the small indignities part-time employees face at the hands of dictatorial manager Mitch — Peter Dinklage, bringing with him some welcome shades of Office Space. Like Jeff, Cianfrance has found enough distance to explore Bush-era America without ever using the name George W. Bush. All of it — impending financial collapse, the criminalization of poverty, the drab fluorescent lives veterans returned home to from pointless wars — plays in the background of Roofman. In his fastidious commitment to recreating the Charlotte of 2004 and his refusal to say the quiet part out loud, Cianfrance makes a convincing case for how thoroughly, completely the Bush administration remade America in the image of megacorporations. Pulling off the stylistic heist of the decade, Cianfrance carefully smuggles his observations into the costume of a middlebrow real-life drama.
Melodramatic movies about real events still get made, but the movie that can do it well while keeping in mind very real considerations about class and the decline of the American empire has become incredibly rare — if it ever had a heyday at all. As long as Cianfrance is out there, though, the torch will be kept lit. He revives the cultural detritus Bush left behind — inserts of the Charlotte skyline framed against a used Chrysler Concorde; a plush chair in the shape of obscure Pokémon Wailmer; Heelys, Green Goblin t-shirts, and Windows XP — while still finding space for the deeply humane, character-driven style that is uniquely his: an understated close-up on Jeff getting cut off mid-sentence at a payphone as he claws desperately for some recognition from his family, handheld tracking shots following Jeff from behind — perhaps the most overdone trick used to incite a sense of immediacy in the wake of The Place Beyond the Pines, where Cianfrance practically patented it — and a nude scene that’s nearly as frank and funny as the one in Toni Erdmann.
There’s not a single facetious moment in Roofman. Jeff adopts the name of avant-garde composer John Zorn — not contrived for the movie, by the way — and ingratiates himself with a local church, a community that’s depicted playfully yet without condescension. In a scene perfectly nailing middle American noblesse oblige, Jeff strikes up a romance with Leigh — Kirsten Dunst, reminding us yet again that she’s one of our most interesting actors — at a singles mixer at Red Lobster. The romance is the movie’s heart and soul: sincere, sparkling, and tender without tilting toward the saccharine. It also features a sex scene unencumbered by neuroses or shame — in other words, it’s a shooting star. The entire supporting cast builds out a fully realized world for Jeff and Leigh to navigate, too — Lakeith Stanfield, Ben Mendolsohn, Uzo Aduba, and Juno Temple all give rich ensemble turns that will surely make Sean Baker green, and the highest compliment one can pay to Tatum in the lead role is that he doesn’t stand out at all; he fits right in with a crowded bench of exceptional character actors.
Roofman really only needed to be a base hit, and in pretty much any other filmmaker’s hands, it would have been. Instead, Cianfrance has overperformed and made something with the kind of intelligence and humility that Roger Ebert would have rewarded with a spot on one of his top ten lists in the mid-2000s. In 2025, we bemoan the slow death of the American drama, but it’s not too late for us to recognize that we still have one of its greatest practitioners in our midst.
DIRECTOR: Derek Cianfrance; CAST: Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, Peter Dinklage, Juno Temple, LaKeith Stanfield; DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount Pictures/Miramax; IN THEATERS: October 10; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 6 min.
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