Sovereign Review: Radical Descent into Extremism

The looming shadow of anti-government extremism has haunted American cinema for decades, from the militia movements depicted in films like The Siege to the conspiracy-driven paranoia of Arlington Road. However, few movies have done a post-mortem review on the human devastation left when ideology consumes a family from within. Christian Swegal’s Sovereign explores extremism with rare emotional depth and ventures into this treacherous territory with an eyes-forward honesty, inspired by the tragic 2010 West Memphis police shootings that left two officers and two suspects dead on an Arkansas highway.

Initially, I braced myself for another “militia flick,” riding alongside self-styled outlaws railing against faceless government. We’ve seen this story before, learned its lesson, absorbed its impact. But Swegal’s movie isn’t preaching to the converted or sensationalizing its tragic inspiration. Instead, it slips beneath the surface of that real-life horror that has haunted headlines and inspired documentaries on the sovereign citizen movement to review and expose the widening gap between authority and those who refuse its legitimacy. Combined with a towering leading performance, the film becomes a heartbreaking case study on radicalization, fatherhood, and the scathing power of extremism.

Jerry Kane (Nick Offerman, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning) was an out-of-work roofer and struggling single father desperately trying to provide for his homeschooled fifteen-year-old son Joe (Jacob Tremblay, Doctor Sleep). Searching for some semblance of control in an unforgiving world, Jerry embraces the sovereign citizen movement, indoctrinating Joe into believing that laws are mere illusions and freedom must be seized (and held) by force.

Considering himself detached from the U.S. legal framework—a conviction born of foreclosure notices stacking up like grim trophies—Jerry drags Joe into the sovereign citizen seminar circuit to make money. As Jerry’s sermons on teaching penniless and desperate homeowners to reject their “straw man” identities grow more incendiary, Joe juggles makeshift homeschooling with the gnawing ache of adolescence. Eventually, his teenage doubts start tearing at the fabric of his father’s fever dreams.

Offerman sheds his beloved comedic deadpan to plunge into uncharted territory in Sovereign. Jerry preaches pseudo-legal gibberish in church basements and community halls, calling into a weekly like-minded talk show with a host (voiced by Offerman’s wife Megan Mullally) that gives him a platform to express his rising rage and review the state of the state for her sovereign citizen listeners. He’s an itinerant, self-styled “foreclosure expert” whose attitude becomes more combustible and unpredictable as county sheriffs and highway patrol officers interrupt his crusade. This is, without doubt, Offerman’s strongest performance to date. He’s neither caricature nor villain but a man who has fallen so deep into his well of false facts that he genuinely believes he’s rescuing his son from ruin, even as he drags his only child down with him.

Tremblay matches him beat for beat, capturing Joe’s shifting loyalties in slight pulls at his shoulders, the way a teenager’s posture can speak volumes. Tremblay captures every flicker of yearning—for a normal school dance with a neighbor girl he can only watch from afar—alongside the reverence for his father’s firebrand ideology. With Sovereign, the young actor has transitioned from the precocious child star of 2015’s Room to someone eager to challenge himself with difficult material, and he’s more than capable of handling the emotionally dense content of an extremist family drama.

Swegal weaves a parallel thread to the Kane’s road trip into extremism through Police Chief John Bouchart (Dennis Quaid, The Substance), guiding his new recruit son Adam (Thomas Mann, Them That Follow) through both recent fatherhood and his introduction to the force. A stark counterpoint to Offerman’s fiery intensity, Quaid’s character is a study in contrast. Bouchart is a man rooted in institution, wrestling with compassion for his son and duty to his badge in equal measure.

Quaid’s scenes opposite Mann are fraught with the tension of expectations. Here’s a father pushing a son toward the noblest version of law enforcement, while the son wants to please his dad but knows he needs to be his own person as well. In brief but respectable cameos, Nancy Travis (Ordinary Angels) grounds the Bouchart family as their matriarch while Martha Plimpton’s (Parenthood) Lesley Anne offers Jerry a fleeting taste of empathy, until his frenzied rhetoric chills even her conviction.

Swegal crafts a tense, slow-burning narrative that examines the human cost of extremism without resorting to simplistic judgments. Striking a lean balance between documentarian grit and cinematic polish, Sovereign marks the director’s feature debut, and his approach admirably resists sensationalism. Dustin Lane‘s unflinching lens lingers on the Kanes’ dilapidated home—the overgrown lawn, the scattered junk, the peeling paint—as if even the landscape is complicit in Jerry’s fantasies of individualism.

Period details—Amanda Wing Yee Lee‘s modest costumes, Emma Rose Mead‘s subtle production touches like threadbare church-basement auditoriums—evoke early 2010s America without turning into nostalgic window dressing curiosities. The score, courtesy of James McAlister of The National, threads in atonal chants that swell and coil up your spine, ratcheting up dread without hammering it home.

Though set in 2010, there’s an eerie feeling that the tenets of sovereign citizens have only grown in the fifteen years since this event happened, but have burrowed deeper underground to remain off the radar. The distrust of government and the lengths to which people will go to maintain their “freedom” feels frighteningly relevant. Watching the film, I couldn’t shake memories from early 2021, when government distrust sparked global unrest. It was startling—and more than a little uncomfortable—realizing how little has changed. What keeps you glued to the screen isn’t the setup but the way Sovereign circles back to a question no one wants to admit they’re asking: What happens when the law you’ve sworn to uphold and the law you’ve sworn to defy look the same in the rearview mirror?

There are no tidy resolutions here. No triumphant last stand. Just the cold fact that extremist ideas can sprout in any soil and spread faster than we realize. Sovereign is a relentless, elegantly crafted thriller that pulls back the veil on the sovereign citizen movement and probes the human cost of absolutism. It asks us to examine whether freedom repurposed as defiance can ever coexist with a society built on shared rules. Swegal has delivered a film that forces us to confront uncomfortable truths through its devastating portrait of a family’s descent into darkness. It’s a film that haunts you and one that demands a long, hard look at the creaky systems we trust and the personal convictions that can tear them apart.