rickchatenever

Someone - I'm pretty sure it was author and political gadfly Marianne Williamson - once said we love our liars.

Their stories are so much more entertaining than the ones told by those boring old truth tellers.

If our current political morass doesn't convince you she's right, check out "Roofman." Inspired by a believe-it-or-not true story, Channing Tatum plays Jeffrey Manchester, a military vet dubbed Roofman in the media during a spree robbing between 40 and 60 McDonalds across the country, plus a Burger King or two, by drilling in through their roofs.

He would lock the employees in the freezer, but in at least one case gave his jacket to one who was cold. That's the kind of guy he was.

This is all basically back story for director and co-writer Derek Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn, who prefer to focus on what happens after Manchester is caught, imprisoned, escapes and spends months hiding out in a Charlotte, North Carolina, Toys"R"Us.

A lot of what happens revolves around Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst). She's an employee at Toys"R"Us, a single mom with two teenage daughters who meets the Roofman at her church. Don't ask ... it's hard to explain.

But when he says his name is John and he can't disclose his line of work because it's top secret, Leigh and the rest of the church ladies are fine with that.

Did I mention that people love liars?

Looking like Channing Tatum helps.

Especially since, no matter how many lies Roofman lives, he's actually kind of a great guy.

As true as the story supposedly is, you have to wonder about Leigh's gullibility welcoming this guy into her, and her daughters' lives. (Kirsten Dunst's touching performance goes a long way toward cutting her some slack.) Criminal minds are wired differently from, uh, minds. But that doesn't make them stupid. At least not the ones like Jeff Manchester. He's frickin' brilliant. Still, jail may be the best place for guys like him, for their sake as well as society's.

Convicts tend to get branded by their poor choices ... not by their smarts and their humanity, which in rare cases like this one, are slightly awesome.

With folks like Peter Dinklage and Juno Temple in the supporting cast, all the performances are heartfelt. "Roofman" feels like a labor of love. The Toys"R"Us setting - which Dinklage presides over like a little dictator - adds surreal goofiness, but a reckoning is inevitable.

Although it falls into the nebulous genre of "dark comedy," and at times tiptoes close to Hallmark Channel territory, by the end - including the end-credits interviews with the actual characters - "Roofman" is surprisingly touching.

A tear jerker, you might add ... with a singular sense of humor.

Jennifer Lawrence is getting all the media buzz for her fearless, bare-it-all portrayal of a young mother losing her mind in "Die My Love." But it's hardly a one-woman show.

Besides Robert Pattinson as her well-intentioned but feckless husband, and icons Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte in the supporting ranks, almost everything else on the screen becomes a co-star under Lynne Ramsey's haunting direction.

A ramshackle, ghosty Montana farmhouse is almost as much a character in the story as the New York transplants Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson) who move in after he inherits it from his recently deceased uncle.

Grace and Jackson make love and engage in hand-to-hand combat - sometimes you can't tell which is which - in these spooky environs that have their own gruesome back story. The mood is eerie. It's as though the house is watching them, director-co-writer Ramsey told one interviewer.

But it's not just the house. Horses and woodland creatures in the night. Weeds in the meadows glistening in the sunlight. Straight black two-lane highways through golden fields. Everything is foreboding thanks to cinematographer Seamus McGarvey's superb camerawork.

It gets harder and harder to tell whether the setting is really that scary, or if each of its components is just a dark mirror of Grace's degenerating state of mind, which becomes more maternal but less stable after the birth of their son.

Postpartum depression explains some of what Grace is going through, but not all. In her past life she was a writer, and Jackson promises their rural, remote new digs are just the place to write the Great American novel.

Well, so much for that, as boredom on a monumental scale replaces Grace's creative spark.

Adapted from Ariana Harwicz's novel, and transplanted from France to rural Montana (actually filmed in Canada), something got lost in translation on the way to the screen. Grace's personality is prickly at best. You praise her baby, or even tell her to have a nice day, at your own peril.

As much as it's those postpartum hormones talking, there's also the problem that nothing in these new surroundings, beginning with her husband and even his salt-of-the-earth mother (Sissy Spacek) is capable of stimulating her intellect. Grace is too smart for her own good.

The script feels more fever dream than straight narrative. Scenes happen out of order; characters appear randomly, the way they do in thought and memory. Lawrence was several month pregnant during the filming, something we're reminded of by her many nude scenes. But we need to pay attention to be sure of what 's happening when ... Lawrence's performance is brave and shattering. Not only is her capacity for self-destruction alarming, but the collateral wreckage of her marriage bounces from bleak to excruciating. It's like Ingmar Bergman for a new millennium. "Die My Love" is often difficult to watch, but you can't take your eyes away, either ... like witnessing a car wreck in slow motion.

It may have something to do with Grace's caustic humor, but somehow "Die My Love" falls into that strange catch-all category Dark Comedy among its other labels on the Internet Movie Database.

Good luck finding much to laugh about ... although the soundtrack does make excellent use of the John Prine-Iris Dement classic duet "In Spite of Ourselves."

In spite of ourselves, we'll end up a-sittin on a rainbow Against all odds, honey, we're the big door prize We're gonna spite our noses right off of our faces There won't be nothin' but big old hearts dancin' in our eyes.

Blue Moon You saw me standin' alone Without a dream in my heart Without a love of my own

Ethan Hawke makes himself almost unrecognizable to play Lorenz Hart, the man who wrote those words.

Hart was five-feet tall, balding, a cigar always in his mouth, his back so curved his chin barely clears the bar at Sardi's where he spends most of the movie "Blue Moon" yakking away. His sad - if witty and sometimes brilliant - monologues are performed for bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), piano player Knuckles (Jonah Lees) and assorted folks who stop by the legendary Broadway celebrity hangout one fateful night in 1943.

Showcasing the alcoholism and other sorts of self-destructiveness that would kill him at age 48 seven months later, it's a daring, all-in performance by Hawke. It's already getting buzz this awards season.

Whether or not it nabs an Oscar nomination or two, it won't win many hearts in audiences looking for a fun night out at the movies.

With composer Richard Rodgers providing the melodies, Lorenz Hart penned the sophisticated lyrics of countless Great American Songbook staples. Along with the movie's title tune, there was "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." "My Romance." "Manhattan." "My Heart Stood Still." "The Lady Is a Tramp." And on. And on ... close to a thousand songs.

For two decades Rogers and Hart were a dynamic duo on Broadway and Hollywood. Piano bar songs on the soundtrack offer nonstop tribute to their musical glories, with echoes of contemporaries like the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin and even George M. Cohan.

Unfortunately, Robert Kaplow's script doesn't immortalize Lorenz Hart for all his achievements, but instead, for being the man who didn't write "Oklahoma!" Richard Linklater is once again Ethan Hawke's go-to director, confining the film's action essentially to one set, unfolding in something like real time on the night of March 31, 1943. For America, in those uncertain early years of World War II, that was the night "Oklahoma!" opened on Broadway and changed everything.

Rodgers and Hart were still a team when they began adapting the play "Green Grow the Lilacs" into a musical. Unfortunately, Hart's habit of going on weeks-long benders instead of showing up for work finally pushed Rodgers to his breaking point. As luck would have it, another lyricist was available. His name was Oscar Hammerstein II.

The rest, as they say, would become history, not just on Broadway but on community theater and high school stages to this day.

Lorenz Hart was in the audience for "Oklahoma!'s" opening night. But the corn as high as an elephant's eye, not to mention the dancing cowboys and the exclamation mark at the end of the title were more than his urbane Manhattan sensibilities could take. So he retreated to Sardi's for some lubricated self-pity an hour before the creators of the show, along with adoring first nighters would arrive to await the reviews.

Those reviews proved to be raves, hardly a recipe for improving Lorenz Hart's state of mind. His conversations with Richard Rodgers (Adam Scott), basking in triumph, are heartbreaking.

Among all the self-deceptions Hart concocts to help make it through the night, is his torrid passion for Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), an aspiring stage artist and daughter of the president of the theater guild. Half his age and his devoted protege, her final admission that she doesn't have those feelings for him is just one more knife in the heart.

The fact that Hart was, in fact, gay in those closeted times certainly wouldn't do much to change those feelings on Elizabeth's part. But when he confides to Richard Rodgers that he is in love with her - "everyone is" - he speaks from the heart.

Insecurities, self-doubt and fear are as integral to the creative process as the exhilaration and joy of success. Hawke's portrayal uniquely illustrates the torture not of a has-been, but of what could have been.

Following last year's brilliant Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown," "Blue Moon" is a reminder that creative genius is not something that a handful of people possess ... but something more akin to a curse that possesses them.

Lorenz Hart was a lover of love, an appreciator of beauty, a chaser of make-believe. Unfortunately, the ability to find perfect words for these wonderful emotions doesn't translate into finding them in real life.