Sovereign
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
Stars: Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay, Dennis Quaid, Nancy Travis
Writer/Director: Christian Swegal
In Theaters and Streaming on Demand
A recent U.S. Navy Postgraduate School study found that some 300,000 Americans identify with the Sovereign Citizen Movement — a statistic that makes Sovereign, the story of a man who drags his teenage son into the depths of Sovereign Citizen madness, the scariest movie of the year.
Employing a sterling cast — led by Nick Offerman (Parks & Recreation) and Jacob Tremblay (The Room) as the tragic pair — first-time feature writer/director Christian Swegal doesn’t just raise a warning flag regarding a real-life, festering subculture; he desperately waves it in our faces, pleading with his audience to confront yet another fringe group that threatens to create an outsized headache for the rest of us.
Jerry Kane (Offerman) is a Sovereign Citizen evangelist, crisscrossing the Midwest holding seminars (cash only, please) promoting — in maddeningly reasonable tones — his crackpot notion that American citizens, through the simple act of invoking their own personal Declaration of Independence, can effectively detach themselves from the authority of the government. For his working-class audience, it’s an appealing notion: no income tax, no driver’s license fees. In Jerry’s particular strain of sovereignty, there is also no such thing as a binding contract: Feel free to walk away from your debts, which are basically a social structure through which The Man keeps you under his thumb.
Jerry’s audiences eat this stuff up. Unfortunately for him and his son, Joe, there are real-world consequences. The bank is foreclosing on the mortgage Jerry refuses to pay. The motel clerk will not let Jerry check in after he draws lines through the legal verbiage on the registration document.
Most calamitously, pulled over for a traffic stop, Jerry gets hauled into jail when he cannot convince the officer to accept at face value the independence-declaring document he hands over in lieu of a license, vehicle registration, and insurance card. The event unspools into a downward spiral, leading inevitably to an unspeakably tragic outcome.
As a counterpoint to the sad saga of Jerry and Joe, Sovereign offers the parallel story of a local police chief John Bouchart (Dennis Quaid) whose son, Adam (Thomas Mann), is currently attending the police academy. A no-nonsense, by-the-book kind of guy, John occupies the flip side of Jerry’s coin: He’s similarly ideological to a fault, oblivious to the way his my-way-or-the-highway demeanor has alienated him from his son (who, like young Joe, clearly adores his dad). Unlike the widowed Jerry, though, John has an endlessly understanding wife (the always-welcome Nancy Travis) to help him strike an uneasy balance.
Writer/director Swegal telegraphs a bit too graphically the awful way in which the worlds of John and Jerry will eventually collide, but the sheer force of his actors’ commitment more than makes up for that. Offerman, speaking in those dulcet tones that could lull a hyena to sleep, infuses Jerry with an infuriatingly calm self-assurance. Wearing a spotless white suit for his American Legion Hall seminars, Offerman’s Jerry so matter-of-factly explains that money is not real, our legal identities and real-life identities are completely separate, and you don’t need to register your car so long as you call it a “conveyance,” it’s hard not to nod along with his enraptured audience and mutter, “Makes sense to me.”
The revelation here is Tremblay (He and Offerman, coincidentally, both appear in this year’s splendid The Life of Chuck). Onscreen from the time he was 7 and continuing through memorable performances in Room, Wonder, and Doctor Sleep, Tremblay has long been recognized as an exceptional kid actor. With Sovereign, Tremblay joins the ranks of the Big Boys. His Joe is strikingly defined with layers that overlap and loop back in on themselves. Sad-eyed and slouching, Tremblay’s Joe watches his unraveling father with adulation and alarm. Resigned to a life of on-the-road home schooling, eating pizza in cheap motel rooms while his father is off preaching his deranged gospel, Joe scrolls through social media on a beat-up laptop, watching from afar as his contemporaries lead the kind of normal life he’s been raised to deplore, yet for which he clearly longs. Wordlessly, Tremblay sounds a silent scream of frustration over fidelity he knows, deep down, his father doesn’t deserve.
Quaid is asked to do considerably less heavy lifting, but his salt-of-the-earth police chief reminds us that no screen actor is better at projecting the conflicted decency of a modern man. He completely owns the film’s final shot, a moment of tenderness we’ve been begging for; a fading flash of hope in a world that at times seems hellbent on strangling itself to death.
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