‘Sovereign’ Review: Nick Offerman Plays an Anti-Government Extremist in Uneven Thriller About American Powerlessness

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For Jerry Kane, the sovereign citizen movement is something between a political philosophy and a burgeoning psychosis. He criss-crosses the motel foyers of the American Midwest, giving sparsely attended seminars about how to avoid home foreclosures — a curriculum that hinges upon insisting that bank loans are “fictitious,” among other conspiratorial tactics. Clutching onto the character’s beliefs with a death grip as tight as it is tremulous, Nick Offerman’s volcanic performance makes it difficult to know where Jerry’s belief ends and his desperation begins.

That’s especially true for the extremist’s teenage son Joe (an unrecognizably grown-up Jacob Tremblay), who’s been raised in the shadow of his father’s anti-government rage, but also crushes on the girl next door and harbors secret fantasies of going to school like a normal kid. The Daniel Plainview of the “power to the people” lecture circuit, Jerry ropes his own son into the family business while denying Joe the agency to choose his own future, creating a tension so powerful that it can only be resolved in death.

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Whose death is a mystery that Christian Swegal’s undercooked but effectively unsettling “Sovereign” chooses to keep secret until its closing moments, as this recession-era thriller —set in suburban Arkansas circa 2010 — has the luxury of being inspired by true events that never quite seeped into the collective unconscious. It was just another terrible thing in an American century full of terrible things.

Swegal’s film broadly glances toward the suggestion that this terrible thing —the specific account of Jerry and Joseph Kane, and not the sovereign citizen movement at large —is emblematic of the powerlessness that millions of people feel in a country that chokes them of their hope and opportunity. It’s an idea that “Sovereign” attempts to explore through mirroring instead of close inspection, as Swegal’s script rhymes the Kane saga with a glorified subplot about local police chief John Bouchart (Dennis Quaid) and his son Adam (Thomas Mann), who just had a child of his own.

These stories, one about cops and the other about law-breakers, play out in parallel until they fatefully intersect during the final scenes, when “Sovereign” reaches for an emotional apoliticalness that gestures at both sides of a broken system without digging into the heart of its failures. Both John and Jerry are fathers trying to mold their sons in their own images in the face of an unrecognizable country, but neither of their struggles is meaningfully explored in the span of a 96-minute film that doesn’t have time to do anything but shudder at these men’s shared helplessness.

Thanks to Offerman, however, it’s a spectacle to watch Jerry argue for his own authority. The heartbreaking source of Jerry’s pain isn’t revealed until the third act, but his obsession with autonomy is so intense from the start that it almost seems to be self-perpetuating. A former roofer who now thinks of stalling the foreclosure of his home as his full-time job, Jerry isn’t an especially dark presence when the film begins, at least not for an anti-government fundamentalist who abandoned all social niceties when he stopped paying taxes. There’s something vaguely sinister about the fact that his teenage son has inherited his close-cut flat top, and that both of them look like cops from the 1950s, but Joe seems less afraid of his dad than he is afraid for him.

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It helps that Jerry’s conspiracy theories are rooted in relatable frustrations, and that the thrust of his worldview — that U.S. citizens are subjects to their government “under commercial law” — has been reinforced by the country’s decision to bail out the banks at the expense of the people they fucked over. In one particularly soft and sympathetic conversation near the start, Jerry remembers his father telling him that his public high school teacher was “lying” to him about the way of the world: “All my life I’ve been trying to figure out what the lie was,” he says to Joe.

But to the hammer, everything looks like a nail, and the personal losses that Jerry has incurred over the decades have soured a healthy skepticism into a mad pathology. While he can afford the latest payments against his house, Jerry feels as though forking his money over would amount to being “conquered.”

Offerman, whose screen persona was founded upon the deadpan libertarianism that Ron Swanson introduced to the lib fantasy of “Parks and Recreation,” has a knack for endowing every line of dialogue, no matter how irrelevant or deranged it might be,with pentecostal seriousness, and it’s seductive —even endearing —to see the actor trace Jerry’s fire and brimstone logic trace back to a place of more hospitable warmth. His relationship with a woman named Lesley Ann (Martha Plimpton) may not be rooted in anything more significant than a widower’s need for companionship, but Jerry’s hardline approach has a genuinely healing effect on her that makes it harder to dismiss the more hostile parts of his ethos.

While every scene pulls Jerry apart at the seams, “Sovereign” is too vague and scattered to chart a legible path toward his breaking point. There are obvious landmarks along the way, none more significant than the simple traffic stop that lands Jerry a stint in detention, and Joe an eye-opening stay at a re-education facility that puts a different spin on personal responsibility. Offerman, though, isn’t afforded the runway he needs to articulate how his son’s emergent self-possession threatens him —sovereignty doesn’t allow much room for compromise, as Jerry knows all too well.

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A former child star whose performance benefits from the meta-casting of watching him grow up before our eyes, Tremblay expertly illustrates the quietude of teenage becoming, but the facts of the case aren’t enough to account for the pivotal decision his character makes in the end. It’s a shame that “Sovereign” fails to adequately tee up that choice, as Swegal —an excellent director of action, it turns out —renders the consequences with a visceral intensity that’s missing from the rest of a film that dulls its focus by extending its scope.

John and Adam Bouchart’s story might resonate with that of Jerry and Joe Kane’s, and it would certainly justify a movie all its own, but what it adds to the Kanes’ tragedy isn’t worth the extent to which it robs this portrayal of their pain. Ultimately, Swegal’s eagerness to listen for the echoes that reverberate across the opposite sides of the law makes it harder to hear whatever they’re meant to say to each other, and the sentimentality he resorts to for clarity makes it harder to understand what their shared message is meant to tell us.

“Power is in the people,” Jerry tells his son. “Always remember that.” “Sovereign” doesn’t allow us to forget, but in trying to assert a power of his own, Swegal —much like the people in his film —can’t help but lose sight of his own strengths.

Grade: C+

“Sovereign” premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Briarcliff Entertainment will release it in theaters on Friday, July 11.

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