‘Sovereign’ Review: In the Rare Thriller That’s Truly Political, Nick Offerman Is Powerful as a Lost Soul of the New Right

It’s the article we’ve all read 100 times. A liberal journalist from the mainstream media goes down to some diner in Ohio or Tennessee to talk to ordinary folks who are Trump supporters, trying to put together a sympathetic understanding of their point-of-view. The crusty true believers will inevitably say they think Trump is too this or too that (“The man is far from perfect”). But then they’ll explain why he speaks for them anyway. Your typical diner-in-Trump-land article will reference such topics as the collapse of American manufacturing, the opioids epidemic, and the stubborn resentment that festers around immigration. Yet the persistent folly of these articles is that they never really, truly explain the rise of the new right-wing politics. They don’t explain it the way a movie like “Sovereign” does.

Written and directed by Christian Swegal (it’s his feature filmmaking debut), “Sovereign” is a startling drama that never once references Donald Trump, but it doesn’t need to. In a way, it’s about something larger than Trump — how desperation and nihilism and extremism have seeped into Middle America, creating the soil in which Trump’s popularity could take root. The movie is a real-world thriller that’s also a riveting character study that’s also a portrait of the place where the reactionary politics of today curdles into obsession.

Jerry Kane, played with short-fuse anger and a compact, bristling power by Nick Offerman, is a man who seems to be standing on the edge of a precipice. He’s an unemployed roofer who lives with his home-schooled teenage son, Joe (Jacob Tremblay), in an ugly neglected ranch house with junk strewn around the front yard. Early on, Joe, with his crewcut and serious eyebrows, answers a knock on the front door, only to meet a bank official who has come to foreclose on the house. We think: His father must be in serious financial trouble.

He is, but Jerry, oddly enough, doesn’t see it that way. He’s a member of the sovereign citizens movement who has become a lecturer, a local guru of the new anti-government militancy. He travels through the heartland, presenting his seminar in bingo parlors and dingy motel conference rooms, preaching to small-town types who feel like they’ve been raked over the coals. Dressed in a crisp white suit (Joe, who he uses as his assistant, wears one too), he presents a spiel that’s all about ownership, and foreclosure, and the power of the banks, and what the government has the right — or not — to force you to do. In a way, he’s selling a a mirage of the American Dream, along with the seductive notion that God isn’t going to be angry at you if you don’t pay your bills.

It’s pure snake oil, and in a way it’s quite mad, but here’s the rub: Jerry believes every word of it. His thinking emerges from Christian fundamentalism (he’s listening to a higher power), yet he articulates a set of rules and statutes that, to him, are the actual law of the land. How, he asks, can the government force anyone to have a driver’s license? A car isn’t a legal construct, it’s just a “conveyance,” and you therefore have every right to drive it. (This doesn’t help Jerry when he’s stopped, without a driver’s license, by the cops.) As for the bank, he claims that it doesn’t own your home. “Where’s my promissory note?” he says. “Where’s all the money you made as the result of the fractionalization of that promissory note, when you re-loaned it out over and over, nine times for me, 22 times in total. Where’s all that?” He has spun a conspiracy that sounds terrifyingly logical out of his feeling that he’s gotten the shaft.

According to Jerry, the whole system of debt, of property and official identity, is part of a shadow reality that the government creates. The on-paper you isn’t the real you, it’s the “straw-man” you. And so your debt isn’t real either. The more we listen to this “philosophy,” the more we realize that it borders on being a form of mental illness. Joe, who in his adolescent way is rooted in the real world, mostly keeps quiet, but Jacob Tremblay gives him feelers. His sensitive performance cues us to see that Joe, though he loves his father, has begun to figure out that he’s got a screw loose. He wants out of Jerry‘s lone-renegade lifestyle.

Even so, as Jerry delivers his hokum, Offerman invests it with a hypnotic clarity, a sense that Jerry is trying to create a rational and just world — to create salvation — out of the irrational. At his seminars, we hear tales of genuine economic injustice: a woman whose mortgage payment jumped $800, a man whose apartment caught fire because of faulty electricity, and now he’s out on the street. So there’s a bit of Michael Moore to Jerry’s missionary zeal, along with a bit of Ruby Ridge and Waco, as well as the hangover of the 2008 financial meltdown, when the banks were bailed out and the little people were hung out to dry. It’s left-wing populism fused with stand-your-ground psychosis.

What “Sovereign” dramatizes is that in the face of a controlling technological bureaucratic society (the tech isn’t incidental — it’s the means of control), the desire for authority, for dignity, for sovereignty, for a basic sense of power over one’s life is now so intense that it’s becoming the hidden engine of our politics. That’s part of what American gun culture is about, and guns come into the movie in a way that feels both inevitable and shocking. “Sovereign” opens with a flash-forward to the death of two police officers who’ve been shot on the highway. We get to know one of these cops, along with their chief, played by Dennis Quaid in a straight-edge performance that reminds you, after the fakery of “Reagan,” what a great actor he is. This double murder triggers the film’s explosive climax — but the cop killer is not who we expect it to be. And the murder itself is not entirely convincing. What is convincing in “Sovereign” is the sense of American life unraveling, and of how that is now creating a politics of doom.