SOVEREIGN Review: Nick Offerman Delivers a Powerhouse Performance in Timely Tale of Far-Right Extremism

In writer-director Christian Swegal’s impressively realized feature debut, Sovereign, Emmy Award-winner Nick Offerman, best known for his long-running role on Parks & Recreation as Ron Swanson, a curmudgeonly libertarian with a heart of gold press latinum, delivers a powerhouse performance as Jerry Kane, a full-time grievance merchant, charter member in the virulently anti-government “sovereign citizen movement,” and the widowed father of an unfortunate, home-schooled teen, Joseph (Jacob Tremblay, Doctor Sleep, Room).

 

Based on the real-life confrontation between a heavily armed Jerry and Joe on one side and law enforcement officers on the other in West Memphis, Arkansas 15 years ago, Sovereign opens closer to the end than the beginning of their individual and collective stories: A police shooting has left left two police officers dead and the local police chief, John Bouchart (Dennis Quaid), almost broken by grief, struggling for answers even as he leads a multi-law enforcement effort to stop the senior Kane by any means necessary. 

 

Hitting the equivalent of a rewind button of a decades-old Sony camcorder, Swegal flashes back to an earlier, far from idyllic time as the senior Kane, living alone with his son, faces the imminent threat of foreclosure for non-payment of his mortgage from the local bank. Unemployed and with few resources, Kane casts blames for his personal and financial troubles on everyone — and just as importantly, every institution — but himself.

 

Kane considers himself a victim first and foremost (also last) of vast forces far beyond his control and the knowledge of average, working-class (white) men. He’s not entirely wrong, but his limited, biased analysis, steeped in conspiracy theories, Christian evangelism, and anti-government fervor, sends him on a tragic road to a predictably violent, nihilistic destination. 

 

An adherent of the sovereign citizen movement that first percolated through America’s far-right fringe beginning in the 1970s, Kane combines his personal experiences with the movement’s core beliefs (anti-tax, anti-debt, anti-government) into touring as a self-described “expert” and speaker. Feeding on similar, shared resentments, Kane attempts to eke out a living from sparsely attended meetings, usually with Joseph as his partner and aide. 

 

Clad in identical, ill-fitting white suits not atypical of televangelicalists, the elder and junior Kanes make for pitiful figures, easily dismissed as cranks and crackpots, yet all the more dangerous and volatile for any dismissal that reeks of contempt, condescension, and derision. Even as they flail and ultimately fail, however, it’s obvious that Jerry’s mistreatment of his teenage son, elevated by Swegal into our primary viewpoint character, constitutes a continuing violation of a parent or parental figure’s obligation and duty towards those in their immediate care. 

 

Swegal divides the screen time between Jerry and Joe, the former increasingly radicalized by periodic run-ins with law enforcement, the latter briefly given a temporary retrieve in a foster home after his father’s latest arrest, and Bouchart and his immediate family, including an adult son of his own, Adam (Thomas Mann), and wife, Patty (Nancy Travis, effective in a minor role). The parallels between the two families foreground key similarities, especially in the rigid, reactionary masculine codes uncritically passed from fathers to sons, but also highlights their differences: One father sees his son as a means to an end, as a foot soldier  in a coming apocalyptic war, the other employs a “tough-love’ approach to parenting as preparation for the violence and predations of the wider world. 

 

Anchored by Offerman’s mesmerizing performance as a flawed man driven by bitterness, resentment, and rage into violence, Sovereign also boasts a string of strong supporting turns, especially a sympathetic Tremblay as the damaged son of a damaged father, Quaid as the face of a more humane form of law enforcement, all but doomed to fail in a country awash in economic inequality, conspiracy theories and all too easy access to high-powered firearms, Martha Plimpton as the senior Kane’s current girlfriend, entranced both by Kane’s dominant personality and the explanatory power, however false and disconnected from reality, of his toxic worldview. 

 

It’s that toxic worldview, once considered fringe, but far from fringe now, that poses a clear and present danger, above and beyond the events involving Jerry and Joseph Kane fifteen years ago, that have all too timely relevance to the current political moment. Swegal doesn’t offer any answers to the multitude of questions Sovereign raises: It might be a story about another American tragedy, one among thousands, but it also serves as a microcosm, an object lesson, and more importantly, a necessary warning to the near future and beyond.