‘Sovereign’ Review: Christian Swegal’s Unsettling Portrait of an Anti-Government Extremist

Before QAnon-ers and Proud Boys, there were sovereign citizens. Originating in the 1970s as a far-right, anti-government movement characterized by a belief system based on misinterpretations of common law, the ideology and others like it have spread like kudzu in our era of economic stagnation and political instability. Now, writer-director Christian Swegal’s feature-length directorial debut, Sovereign, aims to put a human face on a once-fringe movement whose dogmatic belief in hyperindividualism and the illegitimacy of governance has, over the last decade, begun to color mainstream political discourse.

Joe Kane (Jacob Tremblay) is torn. The son of Jerry Kane (Nick Offerman), an Arkansan who travels around the country lecturing small gatherings of working-class Americans on their rights as sovereign citizens, Joe does his best to understand his father’s ideology while harboring secret desires for a more normal life. Meanwhile, former police chief John Bouchart (Dennis Quaid) pressures his adult son, Adam (Thomas Mann), to be the type of hardass recruit and new father he believes he needs to be. When Jerry’s increasingly fraught relationship with local law enforcement lands him in jail, it sets all four men down a path toward an explosion of violence.

Offerman is an object of terror and fascination as a man whose devotion to his credo is both devotional and perhaps its own form of psychosis. Jerry recites pseudo legal jargon and concepts like a catechism: Cars aren’t cars but “conveyances” (thus supposedly skirting the need for sovereigns to register their vehicles or carry a driver’s license) and “strawman” isn’t a logical fallacy but the idea of a legal self separate from a second, ungovernable true self. The character delivers reams of byzantine bullshit with the conviction of a true believer to paying audiences and traffic cops alike, and it’s disturbing to see him cling to words warped into indefinition and bled of their true meaning even as we also see him circle the drain.

But Sovereign is an even bigger acting moment for Offerman’s young co-star. Swegal sets the sylph-like, sad-eyed Tremblay apart as a silent observer to Jerry’s downward spiral in a grim profusion of church basements and VFW halls. Tremblay plays Joe’s repression with a pained interiority that eventually cracks wide open in unsurprising but deeply affecting ways.

The way Sovereign sets two separate fathers and sons against each other delivers the emotional goods. But it’s easy to accuse Sovereign of downplaying the complex interplay of economic anxieties and educational failings that drive people into the open arms of conspiratorial extremism. The film shows the types of salt-of-the-earth folks that fall into this type of thinking to be economically disadvantaged, but the way it sees Jerry’s embrace of the sovereign citizens movement as a result of trauma can feel facile given how a large, diverse swath of the American populace has been drawn to these types of extremist ideologies in recent years.

Sovereign could also be criticized as copaganda for its fairly rosy depictions of Quaid and Mann’s characters. At the same time, the film’s profound sense of the stakes of patriarchal failure ensures that things never feel quite so simple. Sovereign may just scratch the surface of the multitudinous factors that turn people toward brain-scrambling extremism, but as a drama about fathers failing to do right by their sons that reflects a country giving future generations less and less to hope for, Swegal’s film is like staring into a national wound.