Movie Nation

Smart, tense and thought provoking, “Sovereign” is a movie of its moment — thirty years of American moments.

An “inspired by true events” thriller built around a stunning performance by Nick Offerman, it offers insights into Red State America and the cult appeal of of fringe conservatism to rural white America that most every other movie on these subjects misses.

Offerman plays a one-time roofer, beaten down by loss and hardened by struggle against powerful institutions aligned against him, who figures he can resist, stonewall and outsmart banks, the courts and the police through twisted populist faith and a myopic misreading of the law.

Jerry Kane is an Arkansas widower who is home-schooling his teen son Joe (Jacob Tremblay of “Room” and “Wonder”) when he’s at home, blithely ignoring the eviction notices and bills piled on their cluttered kitchen table every time he returns from one of his “seminars” road trips.

Jerry acts the part of a white-suited folk hero, popping up on podcasts, fighting banks and “The System” with a quixotic mix of stubbornness, parsing and twisting the law into his idea of “literal” and when all else fails, flinging “faith” into the argument to end it, at least in the eyes of the gullible.

“You say I owe you something? PROVE it,” he preaches.

Jerry’s a classic “stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.”

The people who listen to him on podcasts and who show up at American Legion halls for his lectures/pep-talks and coaching through foreclosure fights and the like are desperate. Underinformed folks whom life has turned into losers will do anything to flip that script — and that includes rage-blinded trips to the polls and to gun shops.

Jerry has thoroughly indoctrinated his son, from re-interpreting his Red State’s home school workbooks to arranging the boy’s nightly prayers to God, his dead mother and cribdeath baby sister and “J.C. (Jesus). Never forget J.C.”

A big payday means it’s time for the boy’s first semi-automatic weapon and a trip to the range where the targets have a uniformed cop shape.

“Aim more for the head. You know they wear bullet proof vests.”

On the other side of that thin blue line is Dennis Quaid, the aged “chief” of the local law enforcement, grooming his own son (former child actor Thomas Mann) to join the force, watching and reinforcing the rough-handling “overwhelming force” training of much of American policing today. No, you’re not interested in listening to someone’s “point of view.” Your job is ensuring “compliance” with violence and that “overwhelming force.”

The chief’s son is trying to absorb all this, and applying the old man’s tough love to his newborn baby. Comforting crying infants is how you start down the road to “spoiling” a child, Chief insists to Chief Jr.

But young Joe starts to push back at the home schooling so that he can enroll in high school and maybe have a conversation with the cute neighbor (Kezia DaCosta) he crushes on. And officer-to-be-Adam might be inclined to listen to his wife (Ruby Wolf) rather than the old man’s old school parenting when it comes a screaming infant.

Maybe the next generation can change the fate their fathers seem ordained to play out.

First-time feature writer-director Christian Swegal — he wrote Taraji P. Henson’s “Proud Mary” — takes us into “Blue Caprice” country with this tale of a dangerous father, a groomed son and the rising dread about what’s coming. A guy who so enrages a judge that the man summarily rules against him and storms out of court and who infuriates a succession of police who pull him over and don’t accept his “travel” documents, his definition of “conveyance” as it’s used for commercial or non commercial purposes, isn’t a ticking time bomb. He’s a fuse waiting to be lit.

“Is driving a right or a privilege?“

The genuis in casting Offerman is his acting baggage. His no-nonsense “man’s man” Ron Swanson on TV’s “Parks and Rec” and humorous self-reliance memoir “Paddle Your Own Canoe” has a lot of right wing folks making a meme out of him, assuming “he’s one of us.” Yet there he was, best man at a gay wedding on “Parks,” playing a Trumpish tyrant who causes a “Civil War” rather than giving up office, and here he is skewering the whole Sovereign Citizen Movement/Militia Movement and assorted other favorites of the fascist fringe in a single movie.

Offerman makes Jerry Kane seem, at first, somewhat reasonable. When your enemies are the banks and the “fascists” many folks see in the badge-wearing classes, you’re going to get sympathy from several demographics.

Jerry joking about violence against judges, local bureaucrats and the like at his seminars has people shouting “turn off” the video “camera,” lest their shared belief that violence is the best way to get what they want get around. “He’s only joking,” Jerry’s fan and paramour (Martha Plimpton) insists.

We and everybody else know better. Many gun fetishists cling to an Old West “pull the trigger, problem solved” ethos that explains why all the “political” and racial violence in America comes from that end of the spectrum.

Writer-director Swegal doesn’t quite pull off the parallel fathers story structure he was going for, and Quaid’s “chief” seems to be a sheriff, and in either guise would not be the person to interrogate a kid about his not-yet-violent crackpot father to determine if the boy’s in need of social services aid.

But Offerman’s Jerry Kane is a villain for the ages, a man with a point of view that more people share than we’d like to believe. He makes “Sovereign” must-see cinema for understanding not just a “type,” but a movement and a moment, and just where they’re taking us if we let them.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay, Dennis Quaid, Nancy Travis, Thomas Mann and Martha Plimpton.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christian Swegal. A Briarcliff release.

Running time 1:41