Sovereign—distributed by the same company that brought us the 2023 Donald Trump/Roy Cohn biopic The Apprentice—is among 2025’s best theatrically released political features.
The hard-hitting movie dramatizes America’s right-wing terrorist threat, when a so-called “Sovereign Citizen” and his teenage son disastrously face off against the courts, law enforcement, etc.
Writer/director Christian Swegal’s screenplay is inspired by a real-life 2010 incident in which Jerry (Nick Offerman) and Joe Kane (Jacob Tremblay) shot and killed two highway patrol officers and wounded two others in West Memphis, Arkansas, after a traffic stop. (See here a report about a real-life incident the film was based)
As re-enacted onscreen, the peripatetic Jerry was a wannabe motivational speaker who traveled around what Swegal calls “fly-over America” presenting, for a fee, seminars on preventing foreclosures and debt elimination to financially desperate persons. He also appeared in programs, usually online, to promulgate his extremist views. In press material Sovereign producer Nick Moceri is quoted as saying “a lot of Jerry’s speeches in the film are almost verbatim to the real Jerry’s speeches.”
Kane was behind on his house payments and, insisting he was a free man free to travel where he wanted, drove without a state-issued driver’s license or license plates; he also had outstanding warrants. His 16-year-old son Joe, who Jerry was inculcating with his anti-government philosophy, was being home-schooled and often went on the road with his out-of-the-mainstream father.
One of the fascinating things about Sovereign is that Jerry and Joe Kane were not merely acting as isolated individuals but, as the film chronicles, were part of a growing decentralized network of disaffected right wingers. Sovereign’s press notes state that Jerry was part of the “anti-Government ‘sovereign citizen’ movement,’” which is “sometimes referred to as the ‘pseudolaw’ movement for its members’ patched-together ‘belief system’ that posits that courts have no jurisdiction over them, that taxation and Social Security numbers are a ‘conspiracy,’ and that federal laws are ‘illegitimate.’”
One could argue that this philosophy is a form of neo-liberalism carried out to the furthest limits.
It is also a product of the frustration born by the failure of neoliberalism and its creation of a nation of haves and have nots. Further, there is the failure of the political left to educate and organize people like Jerry and Joe Kane, who channel their anger in a violent and nihilistic direction.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Jerry Kane and his young son were active participants in the sprawling subculture of ‘sovereign citizens’ in America: hundreds of thousands of far-right extremists who believe that they—not judges, juries, law enforcement or elected officials—get to decide which laws to obey and which to ignore, and who don’t think they should have to pay taxes.”
SPLC adds: “While many sovereign citizens own guns, their weapon of choice is paper. A simple traffic violation or pet-licensing case can end up provoking dozens of court filings containing hundreds of pages of pseudo-legal nonsense,” and that “its partisans are clogging up the courts with their indecipherable filings.”
To the best of this writer’s knowledge, Jerry Kane did not have a law degree or license to practice law; he had been a long-haul trucker and I would be shocked to find out if he had earned a college degree.
Kane and his brainwashed son are on a collision course with the law, which is embodied by Police Chief Jim Bouchart, played by Dennis Quaid, and his son Adam (Thomas Mann), who recently graduated from the police academy and is a new sheriff on the force his father heads.
The choice of casting Quaid as Jerry’s foil is interesting, as he previously played that patriotic paragon, astronaut Gordon Cooper, in the 1983 space race drama The Right Stuff and more recently depicted the 40th president in the 2024 biopic Reagan.
In the presidential race that same year, Quaid supported Trump (who is unmentioned in Sovereign, as the events in that movie predated Trump’s tossing of his hat into the ring). Having said this, Chief Bouchart seems to represent a traditional law-and-order form of Republicanism, while Jerry personifies the increasingly radicalized brand of far-right or alt-right extremism, now associated with MAGA. One could easily imagine Jerry storming the Capitol on January 6, had he been alive then.
In addition to its political dimension, at the heart of Sovereign are the father-son relationships between Jerry and Joe, as well as Jim and Adam, who is a new father helping to raise an infant.
Joe’s feelings for his dad are conflicted. As a family, the Kanes have suffered the loss of a wife/mother, as well as a baby daughter/sister. So, to be sure, there are strong familial bonds between Jerry and Joe. However, the teenager, who is being groomed by his father to follow in his fanatical footsteps, including helping to conduct those far-flung seminars, begins to question Jerry’s rigid worldview.
He chafes under the overzealous regime that is imposed upon him by his father (who seems to be a Christian Nationalist as, before bedtime, he insists that Joe say his prayers), and in a recurring refrain, is attracted to a pretty Black adolescent neighbor (Kezia DaCosta) whom he periodically encounters.
The film cleverly depicts the interconnection between toxic masculinity and conservatism.
Jim and Adam also have an imperfect relationship, although certainly one less fraught than that of their far-right counterparts. Early in the film, when the police chief picks the new sheriff up on their way to work, and Jim chides Adam for being a minute late, I did not realize at first that they were father and son.
Whereas Jerry is rabid, Jim is tough and tries to impress upon Adam the importance of being strong, including in child-rearing. According to Swegal in press notes, “Bouchart represents the institutional face of that same masculine absolutism,” as he plays the hard-ass protector role. But, as the writer/director adds, the police chief “becomes the moral center of the film, and his shift toward empathy reflects the journey we hope the audience will take.”
Other characters in this R-rated, 100-minute movie include Nancy Travis as Patty, Jim’s wife and Adam’s rock-solid mom. Despite the fact that Travis has been a screen presence since the 1980s, appearing in 1987’s Three Men and a Baby, 1993’s So I Married an Axe Murderer, and more recently in the 2018-2019 Netflix series The Kominsky Method, she has a small role in Sovereign.
Martha Plimpton plays Lesley Anne, an acolyte/groupie who Jerry has picked up through his proselytizing, has more screen time, as she accompanies the Kanes on their anti-government peregrinations. Also an accomplished actress with heaps of screen credits, Plimpton acted in 1988’s feature about New Left fugitives on the lam, Running on Empty.
Like Jerry, Lesley Anne is frazzled and beset upon by the rules and regulations of what MAGA-ites now call “the Deep State.” She appears to be based on Donna Lee Wray, who fell down the anti-regulatory rabbit hole as Kane’s “common-law wife” and was “involved in a protracted legal battle in a dog-licensing case. She filed 10 sovereign documents in court over a two-month period, then declared victory when the harried prosecutor decided to drop the case. A three-year dog license in Wray’s Pinellas County, Fla., costs $20,” according to SPLC.
Nick Offerman, who co-starred in the 2009-2015 TV sitcom Parks and Recreation, FX’s Fargo series in 2015, won an Emmy for HBO’s 2023 The Last of Us, and played the U.S. president in another recent political movie, 2024’s Civil War, is excellent as the blustery Jerry (and much trimmer than the real-life Kane, who had a big paunch), whose certitude has catastrophic consequences.
I would not be surprised if Offerman is nominated for an Oscar in this role. Jacob Tremblay delivers an understated performance as a son caught in the crosshairs of filial loyalty, political insanity and the natural desire to enjoy life as a teenager. His efforts to reason with his deranged, down-the-rabbit-hole dad fall on deaf ears. Dennis Quaid also excels as a pillar of rugged righteousness who comes to realize that “real men” can express emotions, too.
Sovereign is executive produced by Tom Ortenberg, who previously produced Michael Moore documentaries, including Fahrenheit 11/9, Oliver Stone’s Bush biopic W. and Snowden, 2016’s Best Picture Academy Award winner Spotlight, plus the 2024 Trump/Roy Cohn biopic The Apprentice, which had Ortenberg’s company, Briarcliff Entertainment, face off against Trump in order to release that stellar movie in the United States, where it received two Oscar nominations—Sebastian Stan for Best Actor and Jeremy Strong for Best Supporting Actor.
Of course, Sovereign is a feature film intended as mass entertainment in order to generate profit at the box office. In addition to its politics, Swegal stresses how central “the father-son dynamic” is to his story, making much of the movie a family drama.
Jerry’s rambling seminars in the film may excoriate landlords, bankers and the courts, but there is no effort by Sovereign to contextualize the mortgage/foreclosure crisis then sweeping the nation, et al, as being symptomatic of the ills of the overall capitalist system.
There is indeed a lot to criticize about America and its free market economy about, even if Kane is not equipped to grasp what is happening.
And in terms of the “Sovereign Citizen” cause, within certain ethnic frameworks it can take on a whole other dimension. For instance, some Native Hawaiian nationalists believe that the U.S. annexation forced on the Indigenous islanders after the U.S. military-backed 1893 overthrow of the independent Kingdom of Hawaii, followed by statehood, means that American rule in Hawaii today is illegitimate and Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiians) are not bound by U.S. laws.
Furthermore, while the right wing has dominated acts of domestic terrorism, we are also witnessing an uptick in home-grown acts of violence against corporate targets, similar to what anarchists had called “the propaganda of the deed.”
These incidents include two shootings in Manhattan, one of a health insurance company CEO, the other a recent rampage at a high rise where the National Football League is headquartered, which it is suspected was carried out by a former athlete who believed he suffered from CTE brain damage as a result of playing that rough-and-tumble sport in high school.
In addition, Tesla dealerships have been attacked in reprisal to billionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE policies.
But this is not to detract from seeing Sovereign, which after all is not a documentary. From a cinematic point of view, it is far superior to The Militia, another recent movie about right-wing domestic terrorists.
The thought-provoking Sovereign packs a wallop with its take-no-prisoners look at the skewed “Sovereign Citizen” movement, as the far right is ascendent in Trump’s Amerikkka.
And I can’t wait for executive producer Tom Ortenberg’s next political feature, Kent State, which deals with one of the most famous campus protests in U.S. history.
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About the Author
Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian and critic who also reviews culture, foreign affairs and current events.
Ed can be reached at edrampel@gte.net.
