ArcaMax

In the world of Jerry Kane (Nick Offerman), the government is an implacable enemy. Jerry promotes this view on the conspiracy-oriented radio shows on which he sometimes guests, and in the traveling seminars he hosts as he drives around Arkansas and environs in his little white van. "If you're a U.S. citizen," he tells one gathering in a rural American Legion hall, "you're the property of the District of Columbia. You're a subject, not a sovereign."

Jerry Kane, who was a real-world figure, is now the subject of "Sovereign," a darkly compelling first feature by writer-director Christian Swegal. The movie is illuminated by top-level performances by Offerman, who has possibly never been better, and by Jacob Tremblay and Dennis Quaid, also at or near their best. (In addition, the picture is delicately enhanced by an unusual score, a gentle shower of wordless voices composed by James McAlister.)

Given the fact that the movie examines a species of hardcore right-wing extremism, it is surprisingly subtle and emotionally moving. It promotes no alternative take on Jerry's paranoid convictions, even at their most incendiary, but assumes viewers to be adults and leaves them room to draw their own conclusions.

The story begins in 2010, in the shabby house where Jerry lives with his 16-year-old son, Joe (Tremblay). As we arrive on the scene, a cop is at the door, along with a lawyer from the bank that holds Jerry's mortgage, payments on which are overdue. Pointed reminders of this debt have been sent to Jerry and repeatedly ignored. Jerry's response is defiant. "I haven't received anything from them," he tells Joe. "Receiving is a choice, it's not mandatory."

Jerry is a part of the Sovereign Citizen movement, which holds that everything the government tells us is a lie (a conviction that Jerry inherited from his own father). He expresses his virtually all-encompassing resentment in a private language filled with terms like "color of law" and "affidavits of truth" -- terms that have been ruled repeatedly to have no legal validity. Nevertheless, Jerry rants on about the complete primacy of the individual citizen ("We got rights that are given to us by God, not by the government") to the silent dismay of his son. Joe has been homeschooled by his father, and so has had no contact with kids his own age. Now, worn down by social isolation, he sees the world through haunted eyes, and gazes longingly at the Facebook page of a pretty neighbor girl.

As the Jerry-and-Joe story plays out, director Swegal stirs in two more key characters: John Bouchart (Quaid), the local chief of police, and his son Adam (Thomas Mann), a newly minted cop himself. These two upstanding citizens would seem to bear little resemblance to Jerry and his boy, but there are connections, and Swegal allows them to evolve slowly.

"Sovereign" is not an action movie (well, for the most part), but some of Swegal's dialogue lands like a well-placed punch. We begin to realize that Jerry has more in mind than simple political braying when he takes Joe to a firing range to shoot at some human-size targets, and the kid's eye turns out to be a little off. "Aim more for the head," Jerry tells him. "You know, they wear bulletproof vests."

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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