At the time of this writing, I have watched 119 movies from the 2025 release schedule. A lot of those are good, more are bad, and some are great. Well, I had one of the biggest surprises of the year a few days ago when I stumbled upon Sovereign with my Hulu subscription. The movie stars Nick Offerman as Jerry Kane, a real-life sovereign citizen who made news in 2010 for a bloody and deadly shootout with West Memphis police.
When I saw the trailer earlier in the year (and when I saw a clip of a heated courtroom scene on Twitter), I thought this was going to be a run-of-the-mill drama based on a true story that painted its characters with broad strokes and would treat them as caricatures. I was wrong, and this honestly ended up being one of the best films I’ve seen all year.
First Off, The Sovereign Poster And Slightly Inaccurate Synopsis Do The Movie No Favors
Though the Sovereign international poster displaying Nick Offerman firing an assault rifle next to a beat-up minivan is something fierce, the one we got here in the United States is totally misleading and makes this emotional and thoughtful drama look like a bad, bargain-bin action flick. The short synopsis on the movie’s page on Hulu doesn’t do it any favors either:
A father and son, part of an anti-government group, engage in a standoff with a police chief. This confrontation leads to a manhunt for the pair.
This short description gives the false impression that everything that happens revolves around some kind of heated history shared by Nick Offerman’s Jerry Kane and Dennis Quaid’s Chief John Bouchart. While the stories of these two men do play out over the course of the film, their paths don’t cross until the final minutes.
Little did I know when I pressed play that I was about to be exposed to one of the most grueling and emotional character studies I’ve seen all year.
This Is A Gruelling And Emotional Pair Of Stories About Fathers And Sons
At the core of Sovereign are two stories about fathers and sons. On one hand, you have the story of Jerry and his son Joe, played by Jacob Tremblay, as they travel the country giving seminars on evading foreclosure and the principles of the sovereign citizen movement. On the other, there is the journey story about John Bouchart and his son, Adam, played by Thomas Mass, as the young Bouchart goes through police training to serve alongside his old man.
Both of these stories do an outstanding job of exploring the tense relationships shared by fathers and sons who don’t always see eye-to-eye. There’s also a great lesson about the sins of the father being paid by the child, which leads to two of the movie’s most heartbreaking and unforgettable scenes.
Sovereign currently has a 96% critic score (76% audience rating) on Rotten Tomatoes, and after watching it for myself, I totally agree with everything reviewers are saying about it. Now we just need to get more people to watch this tense, tight, and jarring drama.