Lots of longtime sitcom actors use their familiarity in a specific role as a shorthand when they do movies, taking a comedy-to-character-actor shortcut. Certainly Nick Offerman is no stranger to this practice; even when he’s not playing a character written much like Ron Swanson, the manly, taciturn libertarian on the beloved sitcom Parks and Recreation, he maintains a glimmer of that Swanson mystique. (It helps that Ron, at least in the first half of the show’s run before the show started writing him as genuinely cool, had believable and surprising dimensions beyond his broadest anti-government shtick.) In Sovereign, Offerman reclaims that persona and takes it much further, in a vastly different context, as a man who identifies as a sovereign citizen, part of a crackpot movement essentially asserting (through convoluted means) that they must choose to opt in to any U.S. laws and regulations. As a result, the character also feels like a rebuke to those later Parks seasons where Ron became a little too cuddly for the show’s good.
Jerry Kane (Offerman) is not the point-of-view character for Sovereign. We see him largely from the vantage of his teenage son Joe (Jacob Tremblay), who obediently listens to his father’s rantings – delivered with enough of Offerman’s trademark masculine authority to sound, at least at first, like fatherly wisdom. Jerry is affectionate toward his son, sometimes even appearing to dote on him, except for all the benign neglect: He seems to leave home for weeks at a time, delivering rambling sovereign-citizen lectures to like-minded malcontents, while missing (or choosing to ignore) Joe’s obvious yearning for some normal social connections. Homeschooled and unchallenged by the workbooks that seem well below his grade level, Joe wistfully looks at his neighbor’s Facebook page. Meanwhile, the unkempt Kane home is in imminent foreclosure from a bank whose authority Jerry refuses to recognize.
Christian Swegal’s film is most effective in its early, character-study moments, as it leaves the audience to discover that Jerry, for all of his confidence, has a worldview informed by absolute nonsense. He adheres to a set of jargon-y would-be loopholes in the legal system, an unrecognized bundle of misinterpreted arcana somewhere between the fervor of religious belief and (speaking of NBC sitcoms) the childlike faith of The Office’s Michael Scott literally yelling out “I declare bankruptcy!” in lieu of filing paperwork. This is all easy to lecture about in front of paying customers – and Swegal does show how appealing these beliefs would be to people struggling economically or otherwise – but a tougher sell to, say, the cops when Jerry is pulled over and produces his own paperwork rather than a license and registration.
This somewhat improbably puts Jerry and Joe in contact with Chief John Bouchart (Dennis Quaid), a local-ish police chief, and an avatar for the movie’s wobbliness as it extends beyond the father-son pair’s natural orbit. It’s never entirely clear how far afield Jerry and Joe are traveling when they go on a mini-tour of low-rent (but not entirely unlucrative) speaking engagements, nor how close to home they are when they’re detained by the police. But the movie splits off to periodically check in on Bouchart and his own, different-yet-similar relationship with his grown son Adam (Thomas Mann). The reasons for this briefly feel inscrutable, then slightly schematic, then terribly so, which is not the direction where you want things to move. The subplot also introduces tiny distractions, whether technical like the shifting size of Adam’s infant son (who seems to be played by two different human babies and at least one poorly concealed dummy) or logistical like the vaguely depicted legal bureaucracy (if Jerry is being investigated for parental neglect, why does Joe get to immediately leave with him when he’s bailed out of jail? And why doesn’t that investigation seem to uncover that their house is days away from being sold at auction?). The eerie choral score that doesn’t quite fit, either.
Sovereign also makes a last-minute lurch toward more intense thriller territory that manages to feel both inevitable and unearned. The real-life events that loosely inspired the movie likely explain that turn, as well as the movie’s 2010 setting (which can only really be gleaned by a few minute on-screen details). Dramatically, though, Swegal doesn’t quite get there, despite the sturdiness of his lead performers. Offerman is the most eye-catching, of course, bringing a slow-boiling intensity that he masks with his sitcom likability. But Tremblay, too, does a remarkable job, especially for someone who was a cute Movie Kid not so long ago. Joe doesn’t often vocally push back against his father and has virtually no one else to talk to, tasking Tremblay with conveying complicated emotions through his eyes and body language. Instead of drilling further into that, the movie steps back for a broader view of fatherhood, ingrained masculinity, and mistrust that doesn’t quite come into focus.
Director: Christian Swegal Writer: Christian Swegal Starring: Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay, Dennis Quaid, Thomas Mann, Martha Plimpton Release Date: July 11, 2025
