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If Greg Kinnear felt a burden portraying the true story of a Midwestern man coming subtly off his hinges, he won't tell you.

Not even after he met the man's family. Not even after learning how much emotional weight the story still holds for them. Not even after realizing the responsibility of honestly portraying the gruelling story of an engineering professor and basement tinkerer who found himself fighting a decades-long battle against automotive giant Ford over a patent for the now-ubiquitous intermittent windshield wiper.

No, as straight-shooting in person as the late Robert Kearns, whom Kinnear plays in the film Flash of Genius, which opened yesterday, the actor doesn't divulge any gushing emotional insides, no erupting pressure valve, when talking about the role. Why? Because Kinnear himself is of the same Midwest ilk as Kearns, a culture where words can be difficult to come by, and miscommunication is easy.

“There was an element of Kearns that reminded me of my father, and I can't put my finger on it,” says Kinnear, who grew up in Indiana, not far from Detroit, where Kearns lived. “But when I read this script, I had a real moment where I was not all the way through it and I felt like I really knew this guy. I understood the sound of what he was saying.”

In preparing for the role, the actor met with Kearns's grown children, particularly with Dennis Kearns, who is older than Kinnear and a big man. (“He could take me down pretty quick,” says the actor). The inventor's eldest son had helped his father with his long court case against Ford in the 1970s.

“I really was cherry-picking from a lot of different sources. First and foremost, in talking to his family and reading John Seabrook's fantastic New Yorker article, I had a sense that this was a man who had an inherent decency about him,” says Kinnear.

“But the burden of the case brought out a lot of different manifestations, a kind of darker side to him. He became very stubborn, very – I don't know – distrusting and uncompromising, and ultimately very obsessive.”

The script for Flash of Genius was originally called Windshield Wiper Man, and Kinnear was disinclined to read it. Note to screenwriters: Give your work a good title, or no one will take it seriously. “It sat on my desk for a long time. I thought it was, like, a bad superhero idea.”

But when he finally read it, the larger story was of more than a man fighting for patent rights and lost royalties. “I thought that ultimately his fight was great. The intermittent windshield wiper: As interesting an idea as that is, something we're all familiar with, this fight was about bigger things than that. I felt here was a man who had his dignity taken from him.”

Filmed partly in Toronto, the movie – now in theatres – embraces an era when the skinny tie and Detroit-company-man look gave way to gradually widening lapels. It's a time Kinnear particularly likes, although the film's art direction doesn't beat viewers over the head. He also likes the film's subtleties, as the story shows Kinnear's character for all of what might be called his conflicting protagonistic-antagonistic qualities.

“My job was to try to fill in as much of a soul as to who this guy was as I could, while at the same time delivering the goods and moving the story forward, which it had to do,” Kinnear says.

Was Kearns's family cautious, or even suspicious of the ability of Kinnear and the filmmakers to get their father's story right?

“No,” says the actor. “The fruit fell far from the tree. I didn't think at all that they were suspicious. Listen, if Bob had been around when we were making this movie, let's face it: He would have had pretty strong opinions, to say the least.

“With the kids, I think this was cathartic for them in some ways. We showed the movie and it was a hugely emotional screening. … I think this movie in some ways is a bigger full-circle journey for them,” Kinnear says. Bigger than the court cases, bigger than the multimillion-dollar payments their father won?

“Court cases are messy. They end up in certain grey areas. They are going to allow for a certain amount of money to be paid out. And that's all good,” says Kinnear. “But what is money? How much money is enough to claim that he was right and they were wrong? Those are very unclear colours. The way that film is powerful, if the story is told well, particularly in a case like this, is that it paints a more complete picture. And even though their father is represented with some very human, flawed conditions, I think they feel great satisfaction having the whole journey expressed in a two-hour film.”

The maverick inventor's fight against the auto makers, who appeared to steal his windshield design, became like “a third person” in the family, Kinnear says. It was part of “the obsession or the drive that Kearns had, that I'm sure made him a good father, a good inventor – and then ultimately took him beyond the family and on a different path. In his real life, he never left that path. He fought literally to his death.”