In 2010, Jerry and Joe Kane were both killed in a police shootout, after 16-year-old Joe fatally shot two cops who pulled their car over. His father Jerry considered himself a “sovereign citizen,” a fringe anti-government extremist whose movement popped up in the 1970s and who believed that he could exist in the United States while being separate from it. Perhaps writer/director Christian Swegal’s Sovereign, which adapts Jerry and Joe’s story, is the first time many will learn about this shooting, or sovereign citizens. But the incident is still just a small ripple in the ocean of gun violence which has become an everyday part of living in the United States.
Sovereign focuses on the event and the weeks leading up to it in an attempt to illustrate how government failure disillusions the working class towards extremism. It’s timely, evocative subject matter; in the 15 years since this particular incident, the sovereign citizen movement may not have common knowledge, but its philosophies and members have intermingled with other sects of domestic terrorism further metastasized by the COVID-19 pandemic and Trump presidencies. The fated trajectory of the Kanes is fascinating, furthered in cinematic form by Nick Offerman’s blistering performance as Jerry Kane. But Sovereign stalls out in its unwillingness to dig below the surface. A lack of extrapolation on the cascading effects of poverty, alienation, and shared conspiracies keeps the film from being a truly gripping, resonant work.
Jerry and Joe (Jacob Tremblay) live in a derelict suburban home on the brink of foreclosure. Jerry’s wife died of pneumonia a few years prior, but it was the SIDS death of Joe’s infant sister which helped radicalize his father after an autopsy was conducted against his wishes. In spite of Joe’s insistence that Jerry has the money to pay the bank, Jerry’s unwillingness to play nice with bureaucracy leaves the two of them with 30 days to either pay up or vacate the premises. Unbothered, Jerry continues a life led mostly on the road, conducting sparsely attended seminars in which he lectures on an impractical scheme to forestall home foreclosure. Joe tells inquiring authorities that he’s homeschooled, but really, he spends most of his time at home by himself or accompanying his father on his paid circuit of deceit. Instead of academic lessons, Joe learns how to fire assault weapons, distrust authority, and skirt the law.
In his attempt to add color to two people who’ve been reduced to headlines, Swegal imagines Joe as a child longing for a regular life. He covets the normalcy of his next-door neighbor, a teen girl who he clearly has a crush on. While held briefly in a juvenile detention center after his father is arrested for driving without a license or registration, the seed is planted within Joe to pursue placement into public high school, allowing himself to finally receive the education he’s been denied. Joe is caught between two worlds: one with the father who is all he has left, and one in which he has autonomy over the rest of his life. Perhaps the real Joe was also faced with such an incongruous duality, but Sovereign also affords Joe a bit more manufactured sympathy. Though Swegal depicts Joe as having gunned down only the first two officers in the incident which sealed his fate, the reality is that Joe continued to exchange vicious gunfire with the police well after the initial confrontation until he was finally killed alongside his father in a Walmart parking lot.
At the same time, Swegal invents a narrative for one of the first two cops who Joe kills. He renames him Adam Bouchart (Thomas Mann), a newly minted police officer and recent father, whose own uniformed dad, John (Dennis Quaid), discourages his son from doting too much on his crying child. John is a foil to Jerry, two fathers of different standings and ideologies, yet both guilty of failing their sons in their own ways. While simple, this parallel plotline is about as far as Sovereign goes towards adding depth with its fictionalization. Even Joe’s hypothesized turmoil does little to infuse Swegal’s narrative with an expanded subjectivity.
Offerman, at least, channels the most dark-sided version of his Parks And Recreation character, Ron Swanson, a fanciful libertarian caricature suspicious of government influence. But as Jerry, a veneer of confidence—in the face of his own constant falsehoods, plywood weapons against the walls that close in on him—barely conceals his desperation. He quietly unravels, threatening to explode until he does. Tremblay has survived the precarity of child acting acclaim and comes out the other side, delivering a mostly subdued performance that plumbs the schism between fear of and love for his father. Martha Plimpton makes a brief appearance as an acolyte of Jerry’s; like Jerry, she wants to hold off the foreclosure of her own home, crediting Jerry with helping her avoid homelessness. She reveres Jerry like a guru, but it’s another part of the film—one about people, unmoored by a system meant to protect them, clinging to any huckster who offers them a way out—that falls short of its potential.
Sovereign seems compelled to present the story of the Kanes as plainly as possible while allowing its script a small window of truth-stretching, letting the audience draw whatever conclusions they want and not overextending its creative liberties. On its own, it’s an interesting story, but it’s done something of a disservice by a filmmaker who doesn’t want to explore the implications of this societal disenfranchisement beyond bland observations about what it means to be a good father. Swegal coasts on the intrigue inherent to the situation itself, while presenting the audience with a mere echo of the past. Though Offerman buoys the film with terrifying aplomb, Sovereign is a missed opportunity to examine the cascading fallout from living in a country that fails its people and breeds violence.
Director: Christian Swegal
Writer: Christian Swegal
Starring: Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay, Thomas Mann, Nancy Travis, Martha Plimpton, Dennis Quaid
Release Date: July 11, 2025
