This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
What a time to be a middle-aged man! The year began with a film about Bob Dylan going electric, and ends with one about Bruce Springsteen going acoustic. All we need now is for Netflix to pull its finger out and commission a 50-episode series of Master and Commander.
Deliver Me from Nowhere covers the weeks in New Jersey when Springsteen, in the early stages of his superstar status, locked himself away to write what would ultimately be the dark, brooding Nebraska. The album, a set of songs about desolation and murder recorded in his bedroom, was not, it’s fair to say, what his record company was hoping for.
Jeremy Allen White, familiar from his role as troubled chef Carmy in TV’s The Bear, gives us a Springsteen in a similar vein: haunted by a difficult childhood, desperate for parental love, surrounded by wonderful friends.
His struggle is not with the world: he has money and fame and however much they griped, it’s clear that music executives had grasped that they weren’t going to lose money releasing his records. Instead, it’s internal: to get the songs sounding as they do in his head, and to defeat the torment that drives him to write them.
The film is more successful at showing the first of these battles. The creative process is a difficult thing to capture on screen, as so much of it is internal. We see Springsteen down at the library, researching the story behind Terrence Malick’s film Badlands, which inspired Nebraska’s title track, as well as the lengths recording engineers went to transfer the cassette tape he handed them into a form that could be pressed onto vinyl. For fans, and I’m one, this stuff is all gravy.
Do we learn about Springsteen the man? Unlike Dylan, whose cryptic lyrics acted as a shield, the Boss’s appeal has surely always been his knowability. The tales in his songs, of hopes and dreams, and men who act like they don’t remember whilst their wives act like they don’t care, may be set on the Jersey shore, but they are universal.
Do the real details of the singer’s life help us to understand him better than we already did? There are unexplored contradictions: at the same time that he was making the bleak Nebraska he was also working on songs that would make up the stadium-filling Born In The USA.
For all that, I loved it. This may turn out to be a minority view: the audience in the screening I attended at the London Film Festival seemed in large part unimpressed. But I’m probably the ideal audience: a 51-year-old man with a shelf full of Springsteen albums and growing thoughts of mortality. Or, as my wife said pityingly: “You just liked the songs, didn’t you?”
One of my favourite headlines from The Onion is “Romantic Comedy Behaviour Gets Real-Life Man Arrested”. Things that seem charming on film should often not be attempted at home.
This is, I think, the flaw in Roofman, an entertaining account of a real-life armed robber who, on the run from prison, hides out in a branch of Toys’R’Us, falls in love with one of the staff, and ultimately holds the store up.
There’s much to like about this film. Channing Tatum is charming as Jeffrey Manchester, the former soldier who turns to crime to buy the things he feels his family needs, and Kirsten Dunst is great as ever as love-interest Leigh. Manchester got his nickname, the film’s title, for his signature move: breaking through the roof of a McDonald’s on a Sunday night, waiting for the staff to arrive, and then robbing the safe.
After pulling this off an amazing 45 times, he was caught and jailed, but using his military skills escaped by making a compartment under a truck leaving the prison.
This was jarring for me, as I’d already watched a Tatum film in which a robber escaped jail in exactly this way (2017’s Logan Lucky). That was an enjoyable caper in which a lot of money was stolen. Why was it more fun than this true story about Tatum making off with bundles of cash?
Ultimately, it’s the “true” bit of it. Roofman offers us Manchester as a likeable chap, but it’s impossible to escape the thought that what he’s actually doing is preparing to break Leigh’s heart.
It is to director Derek Cianfrance’s credit that he doesn’t try to twist the story to give us a repentant Manchester who tells Leigh the truth, but the unrepentant Manchester is, beneath Tatum’s considerable charisma, an armed robber who is lying to a woman to get her into bed.
Are we supposed to root for him in this? The format of the film suggests so, but we can see he’s a real-life man who definitely deserved to be arrested for romantic comedy behaviour.
Finishing where we began, do I really want Netflix to adapt Master and Commander? The company has funded Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein, and I have my doubts. It’s a perfectly decent not-entirely-faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, and an entertaining enough watch, but there are signs of the streamer’s involvement, especially in the decision to have narration throughout for the benefit of viewers distracted by their phones.
The company wants artistic credibility, but is unwilling to trust its audience. It may be that del Toro wishes he could make films in his bedroom.
