Sovereign: The BRWC Review. By Nick Boyd.

“Sovereign,” starring Nick Offerman and Jacob Tremblay, as father and son Jerry and Joe Kane, is a haunting film inspired by true events in rural Arkansas. The father is teaching his son to have extreme anti-government ideological thinking and gives group talks espousing his views. They live in a rundown house and struggle to make ends meet.

One day they get an eviction notice indicating that if they do not pay the required amount on their house, they will lose ownership of it to the bank and it will be foreclosed on. This angers Jerry, who believes that the bank has no right to take over what he believes is theirs, and he makes his point in court arguing that he and his son are free sovereign citizens, independent of the courts and the banks, operating by their own rules.

As the movie progresses, we sense that Joe is feeling increasingly isolated and lonely and mentions that he would like to enroll in school. (Up until that point, his dad has been homeschooling him, albeit doing what seems like a superficial job at it.) Joe longs to form connections with his peers and to see what life is like on the other side. We see him often looking at the neighbor girl.

His dad, though, is wary of the whole school idea, suspicious of what they might teach his son and how they could brainwash him, ironic, since that is exactly what Jerry has been doing all along to his son.

Once Jerry and Joe see the home they live in get foreclosed on, they find themselves having to live in motels, with Jerry giving anti-government seminar talks to others feeling similarly isolated and entitled, later having his son participate, to bring in any kind of money.

What Jerry and Joe are going through gets contrasted in the film with Dennis Quaid’s character, Police Chief John Bouchart, along with his son Adam Bouchart, played by Thomas Mann. The Boucharts are very much rule-following, by-the-book people. And similarly, John takes great pride in his son. He watches him proudly train for the police academy and rebukes him for picking up his infant, saying it will spoil him. The way the narrative is set up, we know that the paths of the Kanes and Boucharts will cross in a path of destruction.

The film does not explain how Jerry met or knew his ‘girlfriend’ Lesley Anne (Martha Plimpton), whom we see helping father and son after they have been evicted.

Nevertheless, this is a timely and thought provoking movie that does a skillful job at showing how this kind of radical thinking that Jerry espouses to his son can take hold. Both Offerman and Tremblay give powerful and intense performances, with Tremblay in particular showing a rawness and vulnerability.

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