REVENGE OF THE NERD Kinnear won’t let Ford steal his ideas.

Photo: Kerry Hayes

There’s something immensely likable about Greg Kinnear onscreen. It comes across whether he’s playing a conjoined twin for the Farrelly brothers (Stuck On You), a family man pushed to his limits (Little Miss Sunshine) or even sex-addicted TV star Bob Crane (Auto Focus). That likability comes through in person, too, but what stands out is how self-deprecating, reflective and low-key he is. He makes the conversation feel intimate and honest, even though he’ll be trotting out variations on everything he says for another dozen journalists in the course of the day.

The real-life character Kinnear plays in Flash of Genius is certainly introspective, but not always likable. Bob Kearns was an intense engineering professor who, in the 1970s, invented the intermittent windshield wiper. He took the idea and a prototype to Ford Motors; after a few months, the company gave him the brush-off. Imagine his surprise a year later when Ford announced it had invented an intermittent-wiper mechanism. Kearns wanted justice and filed suit, acting as his own attorney. Over the years, Kearns alienated his family with his obsessive pursuit of the case.

“I did find that this guy is spiky,” says Kinnear. “He’s a little abrasive. All in all, he’s not the most charming guy in the world. I don’t normally get asked to play those kinds of characters. I just like the idea of starting with a character like that who ultimately had this foundation of decency. In spite of this side of him, I was rooting for him.”

Though the idea of a drama about windshield wipers sounds a bit crazy, that’s precisely what Kinnear liked about the script. “Usually in these kind of David and Goliath stories, it’s about these big things—nuclear power, damaged water, sick children and healing all around,” notes Kinnear. “And this is the guy who came up with the intermittent windshield wiper: another useless invention! It’s not like the world would not be rotating on its axis properly if we hadn’t come up with that idea. Which made me, as I read it, set aside that whole aspect of it and look at why he was fighting.”

In fact, Kinnear reveals, it took him a long time to get around to reading the script due to a bad working title. “It was called Windshield Wiper Man originally. I thought it was the last bad comic-book-hero movie that hadn’t been made yet: The Windshield Wiper Man! It’s just the funniest title. So literally I didn’t crack it for ages.”

Once that mistake was cleared up, Kinnear found a role with bits of actor catnip; he gets a nervous breakdown and a trial sequence. “As an actor you just always look for the day you get to be in a courtroom and scream, ‘You’re out of order. He’s out of order,’ ” he says with a laugh. “I get my courtroom scene, and I’m playing a guy that doesn’t really have the credentials to be in a courtroom. It’s kind of the opposite of your typical courtroom performance that you see in terms of what the job is for an actor, so that was cool.”

Kinnear’s career has been solid, but because he got an Oscar nomination for one of his earliest film roles (in As Good As It Gets), there were high expectations. Talking about how he chooses roles, Kinnear shows surprising candor. “There’s never been a kind of role or genre that I’ve actively sought out, like ‘I need to do something like this.’ I’ve never pursued that, for better or for worse. Maybe I should.” But even as he considers the career he didn’t chase, Kinnear seems happy with the work he’s done.

It’s a body of work with surprising range. Kinnear slips easily between comedy and drama, and says he doesn’t prefer one over the other. “If it’s bad material, you’re in trouble either way” he notes with a wry smile. “But I will say that with comedy, when you finally put it up there, there’s just no fooling yourself on the reaction. There’s an audible reaction of yea or nay.

“And when you go to drama,” he continues, “people probably walk out of the worst drama ever made…well, you watch the worst drama ever made the same way you watch The Godfather. Everyone’s just sitting there quietly and watching with their eyeballs on the screen. What they say at dinner that night is a totally different thing.” After Flash of Genius, they’re likely to be saying something along the lines of “That Greg Kinnear, he makes you like the guy.”

Flash of Genius opens Friday. See timeoutchicago.com/nowplaying for showtimes.