Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay are father-son extremists (exclusive)

Not long after Christian Swegal completed the script for his directorial feature debut, Sovereign, a mob descended upon the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021. 

Mobilized by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election had been stolen, a horde of extremists stormed the chambers of Congress as elected officials barricaded themselves inside offices and supply closets. More than 100 officers were injured and five people died from the attack, the effects of which continue to reverberate across the U.S. today. For the filmmaker, the timing could not have been more apt. 

“If you can get past the first layer of judgment, a lot of those people came to this from a place of total desperation: poverty, mental illness, not having access to support structures,” Swegal tells Entertainment Weekly. “I think there’s this sort of knee-jerk reaction for society to want to condemn, and certainly in some cases that’s the right answer. But there should also be a conversation about how this happened. How does somebody end up in that situation?”

Sovereign, which stars Nick Offerman and Jacob Tremblay as a father-son anti-government extremist duo, concerns those questions. 

Inspired by the deadly 2010 Arkansas shooting involving father-son “sovereign citizens” Jerry and Joe Kane, Sovereign stars Offerman as Jerry Kane, a single father struggling with mounting debt who embraces the sovereign citizen movement, a flourishing conspiratorial group in the U.S. that consider themselves exempt from the laws of what they call an illegitimate government.

When evicted from their home, Jerry and his teenage son Joe (a revelatory and gutting Tremblay) hit the road to sell sparsely attended debt-relief seminars across the country. As Jerry’s ideology becomes increasingly extreme, Joe begins to question his father’s worldview.

Dennis Quaid rounds out the cast as Jim Bouchart, a police chief who finds himself on a grievous collision course with the Kanes.

“The movie deals with political subject matter, but we tried to make an apolitical film that was really about the people at the center of it,” Swegal says. “I feel like when people typically approach a film that deals with extremism, there’s judgment that goes along with it. Without excusing it, this was a horrible tragedy. All these fringe conspiracy theory-driven theologies [are] a very real phenomenon in our country, but my interest was really the father-son story.”

Joe and Jerry Kane’s relationship is the core of the film, though Swegal also weaves in the father-son arc of Jim Bouchart and his son Adam (Thomas Mann) to tell a larger story. The isolated and homeschooled Joe has a loving relationship with his father but longs for a normal life. Adam, a fellow police officer and father to a newborn, similarly has a loving relationship with his dad, but the two have differing perspectives on parenting.

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“This is a familiar relationship for a lot of men where, as a father, you feel this need to mold your son into a way to be in the world,” Swegal, a new father himself, says. “Both Jerry and Jim in this movie are trying to shape their sons into a version that they believe is the right version. It’s this clash between law and order. They’re both very rigid in that way.”

Offerman and Tremblay “really created a bond” while filming, Swegal continues. “They got so close. They still text back and forth, and we have group texts and stuff. I think that was the heart of it for Nick.”

The feature, gearing up for its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival on June 8, mines those familial bonds to tell what Swegal calls a uniquely American story about “what happens when the system fails.” The answers, though, aren’t always clear-cut. “My favorite types of films ask questions rather than present answers,” the filmmaker says. “I hope that people watch the movie through that lens. Things are very polarized right now in the world. I hope that it brings up a lot of discussion about some of these issues.”

Sovereign arrives in theaters on July 11.