During a routine traffic stop in West Memphis, Arkansas, on May 20, 2010, two police officers stopped a white minivan with unusual Ohio license plates driven by Jerry Kane Jr. (45) and his 16-year-old son, Joseph. A struggle ensued, culminating in mayhem and death. This event led to Christian Swegal, a graduate of USC School of Cinematic Arts, making his feature film debut as writer and director with Sovereign, based on the tragic, off-the-legal-grid life of the Kanes.
As a self-identified “sovereign citizen,” Jerry Kane believed he had immunity from many of the requirements of the law, including the need to possess a driver's license in order to drive.
The film opens with a radio talk during which one Memphis police officer tells another that two officers have been shot dead during a traffic stop. The director then moves into flashback mode until returning to the tragedy at the end of the film. In the first flashback scene, 16-year-old, homeschooled Joseph (former Canadian child star, Jacob Tremblay) is home alone when he receives a visit from the authorities informing him that the home his father owns is going to be foreclosed. The bank's lawyer asks Joseph to keep the property presentable until it goes up for auction.
Joseph dutifully sets about tidying up the front yard and the house before his widower father (Nick Offerman) returns after a lengthy absence. “You're getting strong,” he tells his son as they hug. “My compliments to the chef,” Jerry says after his son's cooked what looks to be a Hamburger Helper concoction for dinner. The kid's had to learn how to survive on his own. But Jerry has no interest in the news of the foreclosure. He doesn't even want to see the bank documents his son tries to show him.
“I haven't received anything from them,” he tells Joseph. “Receiving is a choice. It's not mandatory.” He's referring to the pseudo-legal, sovereign citizen concept that refusing to “receive” documents like foreclosure notices means the documents don’t apply to the intended recipient.
Entertaining such delusions, as Sovereign demonstrates, is a fast track to disaster. The film’s the story of how the walls close in on this close father-son duo until the inevitable explosion comes.
Jerry believes in his cultish, convoluted legal theorizing, but Joseph isn't so sure. Former-roofer Jerry makes his living by traveling around the Midwest—Trump country—and selling his bogus seminars held in cheesy venues to suckers on foreclosure-related topics, with some religion mixed in. He's decided to take Joseph on the road with him this time. When the cops pull them over one night and demand Jerry’s license, he shows them his homemade “travel documents.” When told he needs a license and proof of insurance to operate a vehicle, he says, “It's not a vehicle, it's a conveyance.”
Jerry denies that he's even driving, claiming to be "traveling" instead. All of this is the standard wordplay sovereign citizen drivers use when confronted by law enforcement, even though it never works. Jerry gets arrested and jailed, but it's not fatal for anyone this time. After his release, with unshakable confidence he tells people that he's preparing an invoice to give to the police for $80,000 in gold and $100 for each of the 94 hours he was incarcerated. Jerry's also going to liquidate the arresting officer’s assets via a “mechanic lien sale,” a legal recourse available to contractors who haven’t been paid for work on real estate, but not those who’ve been arrested during traffic stops.
The self-belief of the sovereign citizen, however, isn’t rooted in reality and experience. One of the biggest mysteries surrounding the movement is where that faith-like belief comes from.
Offerman played an anti-government libertarian in the sitcom, Parks & Recreation, but he played it straight. The humor was in his smug self-seriousness. Jerry's also self-serious and smug, but all of the humor’s stripped out of Offerman's portrayal of him because sovereign citizens don't have much of a sense of humor. It's the best role Offerman’s taken on in his career. He captures an unwavering commitment to a set of ideas that make no sense to those outside his insular community.
Offerman’s Jerry is paranoid, but doesn't overplay it. Rather, he simmers in his madness in a way that holds the audience's attention. Jerry has a narrow set of beliefs that are crazy, but he's also a loving father who cares about those close to him, as demonstrated in a moving scene in which he gets his balking girlfriend, Lesley Anne (Martha Plimpton), to confront her crippling fear of horses.
Without the sovereign citizen charade, and back in his job as a roofer, Jerry could be a solid single dad.
Jacob Tremblay’s Joseph provides the emotional core of the film as he fights to find a balance between his desire to be a normal kid with a regular social life and his loyalty and love for a father who takes him along for the ride as he spirals towards ideology-propelled oblivion. Tremblay doesn't need many words to portray his character’s heartbreaking vulnerability and doubts. Instead, he conveys his emotions with facial expressions, posture, downcast eyes and silent reflection. The degree to which Joseph is caught up in his father's doomed world isn't revealed until the end of the film, so when that happens it's a major surprise, and it's not all that convincing. A film with no glaring flaws ends on an off note.
The Kanes are evicted from their foreclosed home, to the surprise of nobody but Jerry. This puts Joseph and him on a collision course with the law, specifically with another father-son duo, this one representing the side of law and order: Police Chief John Bouchart (Dennis Quaid) and his police academy graduate offspring, Adam (Thomas Mann).
Quaid, after his awful performance in Reagan, delivers a warm, controlled performance that adds an element of logic and irony to the film. An empathetic, father-like Bouchart went to great lengths to help Joseph out while his dad was in jail after the first traffic stop, but the payback he gets is unthinkable. Both fathers, Jerry and John, are intent on indoctrinating their sons into their own image, a reflection of the director's theme about the destructive nature of uncompromising conviction when passed down from father to son.
In the final scene, director Swegal attempts to address this issue by having Chief Bouchart comfort his son’s crying baby boy, even though he'd always been overbearing in his insistence that Adam should never pick up a crying baby. His lawless counterpart Jerry, however, never showed a capacity for such self-reflection.
Sovereign doesn't preach. Its focus is on how a rigid attachment to cultish ideas is a selfish act that can lead to the destruction of everything that's important in one's life, including family. Jerry’s main problem was one of misplaced priorities on essential issues, based on the stubborn miscalculation that he was special.
Sovereign has a neo-Western mood: a morally conflicted hero, vigilantism, and a law enforcement vs. outlaws theme. One lesson it teaches is that living off the grid is possible only if based on a well-thought-out set of ideas that’ve already been tested.