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Sovereign is a story based on true-to-life events where a father-son duo kill two police officers in an infamous shootout known as the 2010 West Memphis police shootings. Starring Nick Offerman and Jacob Tremblay in leading roles, the film presents a provocative take on the modern world and the disregard for authority it inspires.

Although the film will be lost in the myriad of summer blockbusters and films like Superman, the Nick Offerman film wants to give out a quiet message about the current situation and how far people can go before all hell breaks loose.

Nick Offerman’s Sovereign Is the Perfect Antithesis to Superman

The father-son relationship in Sovereign, where Offerman’s Jerry Kane teaches his son Joe Kane extremist views about the world, and how they are above the law, is very similar to something that Jor-El said to David Corenswet’s Kal-El in James Gunn‘s Superman.

(l-r) Jacob Tremblay as Joe Kane and Nick Offerman as his dad Jerry Kane, in Sovereign. Courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment

It is not kings but citizens as sovereign, as Nick Offerman stars as a father of a teen-aged son, played by Jacob Tremblay, in the true story-based thriller in Sovereign, about these followers of the extremist, anti-government Sovereign Citizen belief system. The film also features Dennis Quaid, who plays a police detective, also a father but of a grown son who is training to become a policeman, who the father and son extremists encounter. This tale of two fathers is tense, moving and heartbreaking, as their world views come into conflict.

A little research uncovers that “Sovereign Citizen” is an actual far-right, anti-government world view, based on pseudo-legal beliefs derived from their interpretation of parts of the U.S. Constitution, a version of the Magna Carta and British common law.

The first full trailer for Sovereign—Christian Swegal’s feature debut starring Nick Offerman and Jacob Tremblay—arrived online on 26 June, following the film’s world bow at the Tribeca Festival on 8 June and confirming a 11 July U.S. theatrical and digital rollout via Briarcliff Entertainment. The true-crime drama chronicles Jerry and Joe Kane, itinerant lecturers steeped in the anti-government “sovereign citizen” ideology whose 2010 traffic-stop standoff in West Memphis, Arkansas, left four people dead.

Offerman portrays the elder Kane as a cash-strapped roofer selling debt-relief seminars while indoctrinating his 15-year-old son; Tremblay plays the increasingly conflicted Joe. “Instead of vilifying people who get bad information, I hope audiences empathize with them,” Offerman told People. Tremblay said the role forced him “to put myself in another person’s shoes I would never imagine”.

Swegal, who wrote the script before the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot, says the film asks how economic despair can tip ordinary families into extremism.

Before QAnon-ers and Proud Boys, there were sovereign citizens. Originating in the 1970s as a far-right, anti-government movement characterized by a belief system based on misinterpretations of common law, the ideology and others like it have spread like kudzu in our era of economic stagnation and political instability. Now, writer-director Christian Swegal’s feature-length directorial debut, Sovereign, aims to put a human face on a once-fringe movement whose dogmatic belief in hyperindividualism and the illegitimacy of governance has, over the last decade, begun to color mainstream political discourse.

Joe Kane (Jacob Tremblay) is torn. The son of Jerry Kane (Nick Offerman), an Arkansan who travels around the country lecturing small gatherings of working-class Americans on their rights as sovereign citizens, Joe does his best to understand his father’s ideology while harboring secret desires for a more normal life. Meanwhile, former police chief John Bouchart (Dennis Quaid) pressures his adult son,...

George Romero's 1968 film "Night of the Living Dead" has become a cornerstone of horror movie history, but once upon a time it was just a little independent movie from a relatively untested director. While later Romero movies would have been able to draw crowds of fans clamoring to get a peek at the director or some of the stars he worked with, things were a little different when filming "Night of the Living Dead." The movie was shot in rural Pennsylvania, which meant there weren't many opportunities for crowds, but one sequence drew the locals out to take a peek. While filming a sequence in Evans City, Pennsylvania, which involved some of the film's undead "ghouls," local residents turned up in droves to catch a glimpse of one particular ghoul, and it had nothing to do with wanting to see the special effects makeup making her look undead.

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