It begins, as so many films like this do, with the phrase “Inspired by true events.” I have learned to be wary of that line. It rarely tells you which truths have been excised. It’s the cinematic equivalent of “some scenes have been added for dramatic effect” a warning that the truth has already been stylised.
Directed and written by Christian Swegal, Sovereign stars Nick Offerman as Jerry Kane, a self-styled constitutional outlaw, and Jacob Tremblay as his teenage son Joe, drawn into the spiral. Dennis Quaid plays Sheriff John Bouchart, the quiet representative of institutional authority. What follows is not a polemic, but something more subdued. This film is a grim, dislocated study of belief, shame, and inheritance.
It’s strange when two films land so close together, both circling similar territory. The Order, released just weeks before Sovereign, follows Jude Law as an FBI agent embedded deep in 1980s America, chasing down a violent neo-Nazi militia. That film is broader, more procedural, all federal briefings, raids, rifles, and ideology. But the core’s not that different: men trying to reclaim control through violence, belief systems passed on like heirlooms, and sons caught in the wreckage. One film tracks the state bearing down on white terror; the other, the slow internalisation of it, a father radicalising his son in real time. Different registers, same American sickness.
What follows is disorientation. A 911 call reports that police have been shot. No faces, no explanation. Just panicked calls and the distant hum of official machinery. Then, silence. A adolescent boy lies on the floor, cartoons flickering on the TV behind him. A knock at the door, his dog flies over the top of him. A sheriff and a bank official have come to repossess the home. The father is not here. The notice they hand over joins a mound of unopened bills and legal documents on the kitchen table. A small archive of systemic failure. There’s no manifesto, no standoff, just a child being quietly dispossessed.
This is the real beginning of Sovereign. Not ideology, not trauma, but the slow, grinding humiliation of poverty. The home (that last fragile symbol of stability and place) goes first. Then the story begins.
We see Joe, the boy, tagging along as his father Jerry delivers seminars on sovereign citizen law. We see cheap motels, plastic chairs, men nodding along while Jerry preaches about jurisdiction and fictitious capital. At first, Joe is just the cameraman. Then he starts handing out flyers. Then counting the takings. There’s a telling moment where he asks how much they’d need to pay the bank to get the house back. Jerry dismisses him. Next scene: they’re buying guns.
Joe’s radicalisation doesn’t come through the internet. It comes through inheritance. In this story, the internet isn’t a pipeline to extremism, something softer, more adolescent. Joe uses Facebook to look for people he knows, the girl up the street he likes. He’s not searching for doctrine. He’s searching for connection. What radicalises him is being pulled into his father’s orbit. He’s not seduced by ideology. He’s recruited into it. What began as a child trying to understand his father becomes something else entirely. A loyalty test with live ammunition.
There’s a scene that crystallises this: Joe firing an assault rifle at a target shaped like a police officer. His shoulder’s bruised, but he keeps going. Afterwards, Jerry winds the target back in and inspects the holes. “Aim for the head,” he says, almost casually. “They wear vests.” It’s not barked as an order. It’s offered like advice, the sort passed between men in parking lots, gun shows, motel lobbies. A father fine-tuning his son’s kill shot.
Yet, for all this, the film keeps the lens tight. There’s no media, no online forums, no wider militia network. Jerry is portrayed as if he dreamt all this up himself. A fringe figure in a vacuum. But the sovereign citizen movement didn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s been built over decades, fed by conspiracy, racialised grievance, and the slow collapse of American civic life. This is the place of where the Trumpocene began. But by refusing to show the wider network, Sovereign lets the state off the hook. Jerry may be an aberration, but he’s also a symptom. Someone sold him this story.
The visual palette underscores this silence: all sodium light and highway motels, Bible Belt Americana rendered in soft desaturation. Glowing white churches, neon signs promising both salvation and supper. At the centre: a man, his car, and his gun. This is pure Americana. Not the myth of reinvention, but the fantasy that remains when everything else is lost. The frontier dream on life support.
There’s a brief interlude when Jerry is arrested. He refuses to hand over license and registration. Joe is spoken to by the Sherrif and a social worker. We learn his mother died. His father isn’t allowed firearms. “Your dad doesn’t like the government much,” the sheriff says, smirking. “Got some interesting ideas.” Everyone sees the danger. No one stops it.
Placed briefly in care, Joe is allowed to be a boy again. He shoots hoops with other kids. Laughs. Is silent in a different way. It’s a glimpse of what could have been. A brief reprieve. But Jerry comes back, and the state lets him walk out with his son. The rescue was never real.
From there, the spiral accelerates. Jerry’s new girlfriend tries to downplay his behaviour, insists he’s joking when he talks about violence. But then he says it outright. A biblical-sounding tirade about killing a man’s chickens, goats, pigs, sisters, wives. “Once I start,” he says, “I don’t think I can stop.” It’s no longer about sovereignty. It’s about domination. The ideology has collapsed into the raw language of conquest.
Joe hears it now. He doesn’t speak, but he sees his father for who he is. He sits in the same room, but he’s already somewhere else. He just wants to go to school. Escape. Tremblay plays this with extraordinary restraint, a child coming into terrible clarity.
Meanwhile, Jerry is coming undone. The seminars are empty. The money is gone. He drinks again after 18 years of sobriety, gambling in a casino with his girlfriend’s cash. On his radio show, once a platform for fire and fury, he just sounds tired. “Is it all the travel?” the host asks. “The travel’s fine,” Jerry replies, “as long as I can keep the chains off.” It’s the most honest line in the film. The chains aren’t metaphors for the state. They’re shame. Debt. Defeat.
In the film’s final stretch, we’re offered a contrast: Sheriff Bouchart and his son, training to be a police officer, gently mocked by his instructors as “baby chief.” Their relationship isn’t tender, but it’s intact. It’s what passes for continuity. A family on the inside of power. We even have the new baby keeping the son up.
Not so for Joe. The film ends in confrontation: Jerry and Joe pulled over in a mall car park. A fitting setting for a sovereign fantasy turned to dust. These are the symbols of new Americana: asphalt, retail signage, police cruisers. Jerry is armed and defiant. The shootout is fast, brutal. Afterwards, the narrative pivots. Not to Joe, but to the officers. The protectors of property. There’s mourning. Reverence. Flags. Joe disappears from the frame. We see the foreclosure sign outside their old house. The family dog (amazingly unharmed in the shoot out) has run off. The boy we’ve followed is nowhere.
That’s where the film misses, for me. It begins as a story of inheritance (of masculinity passed like a curse) but it ends by flinching from its most important subject. Joe isn’t mourned, interrogated, or redeemed. He’s just absorbed into the silence that shaped him.
The sovereign father dies in a blaze of delusion.
The son just disappears.
