Offerman's Honor

Nick Offerman, an actor with presumably down-the-line liberal views, had as his most prominent role Ron Swanson, a libertarian government official, on the sitcom Parks and Recreation. On a show created by liberals and mostly directed towards a liberal audience, Ron was nearly always presented positively, although that was probably more a function of that show, especially in its latter half, portraying all of its characters as nice and conflict-free.

In the new movie Sovereign, Offerman plays a considerably less warm-and-fuzzy creature of the American political right—a real-life figure of the sovereign citizen movement, a loose association of anti-government activists and conspiracy theorists who make a variety of dubious claims about what the government can and can’t do to them. Offerman plays Jerry Kane, a widowed single father, while Jacob Tremblay is his teenage son, Joe, in the loosely fact-based story of a Sovcit-centered conflict that ended in real-life tragedy. He disappears into the role in a way that Offerman doesn’t typically manage.

Jerry Kane was a man who traveled the country spreading the sovereign citizen gospel, including telling people how to avoid paying their mortgage and taxes. He also refused to have a driver's license or any other government documents, which ended up having deadly consequences.

Tremblay, in a career that started at a young age, has often played characters who are victimized, whether he was held captive (in Room) or bullied (in Wonder) or graphically murdered on screen (Doctor Sleep). Here, the 18-year-old Tremblay is indoctrinated into a horrific belief system.

Also on board are Dennis Quaid as a police chief, Martha Plimpton as Jerry’s sometime girlfriend, and the long-absent Nancy Travis, from Three Men and a Baby and So I Married an Axe Murderer, as Quaid’s wife. There are also scenes with Quaid and his son (Thomas Mann) to set up parallel father-and-son plots. It’s a tense, nerve-wracking treatment of the material, one that humanizes the characters, without making excuses for them.

Sovereign citizens are mostly, it’s fair to say, crazy people. I know cops and lawyers who’ve had to deal with them in a professional setting, and they pop up in the occasional viral video. They’re occasionally dangerous, but more often, they’re merely a nuisance, liable to either file rambling, legally questionable lawsuits, argue with judges about the authority of the court, or get into long, silly legalistic arguments with customer service personnel about how they shouldn’t have to renew their drivers’ license or pay taxes.

Sovcit types often get into situations that are unintentionally hilarious, but the story told by Sovereign isn’t one. Sovereign, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and arrives in theaters July 11, represents the promising directorial debut of Christian Swegal. It could be unbearable to spend 100 minutes with people like this, but the filmmaker and actors succeed in telling a compelling story about them.

It’s worth noting that these events took place in 2010, before the existence of QAnon and some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories that would interface with the sovereign citizen movement, and also a decade before the pandemic, which sent the sovereign citizen worldview into overdrive. This allows the film not to get too preachy about tying the story to current events.