Greg Kinnear on his latest film, 'Flash of Genius'

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In his latest film, "Flash of Genius," as well as in other movies he's made this decade, Greg Kinnear seems to have spent more than his fair share of screen time in pajamas or bathrobes.What gives?"I'm not gonna lie to you, I'm not in a great clothing window right now in terms of my characters," says Kinnear. "Between 'Auto Focus' and playing Dick Vermeil (in 'Invincible'), wearing the green pants, and now Bob Kearns. I'm definitely struggling a little bit, but that's the nature of the business."I think 'Ghost Town,' where I'm in a beautiful black tuxedo, is the turning point, so I'm confident that I'm back on again.""Ghost Town," Kinnear's other fall film, has the actor playing a ghost who's stuck in the clothes in which he died."I had more changes than a Barbra Streisand concert for 'Flash of Genius' and then two weeks later started 'Ghost Town,' " he says. "To be in just one outfit was quite delightful. Wouldn't have picked a tuxedo, to be honest, 'cause it's got lots of little switches and sticks and grippers and clips, as you know, but it was OK."The former TV host ("Talk Soup," "Later With Greg Kinnear") and Oscar nominee ("As Good as It Gets") can swing from flippant to serious and back in a nanosecond. Of course, he is a Gemini. Kinnear, 45, says he was captivated by the script for "Flash of Genius," which tells the true-life story of Bob Kearns, a Michigan man who invented intermittent windshield wipers and then spent nearly two decades suing Ford Motor Co. for stealing his patents and not giving him credit for the invention."I just felt, after reading the script, that there was a very beautifully written human story there about a guy who was not painted in all these heroic colors the way that David-versus-Goliath stories sometimes can be," says the "Little Miss Sunshine" star. "He was a prickly, bristly, abrasive guy, and the script didn't shy from that. It drew a very flawed man."At the same time, I felt like there was this underlying, undeniable dignity to what he was trying to do and what he needed. He didn't need money; he didn't need so many things that would have revealed a not-as-flattering side. He really needed this company to admit that they stole his idea, which made it about principle."Principle in literature and cinema has always been a good road; it's good material. I felt like in this case it was drawn up in such a great American story. The audacity of this guy to take on the Ford Motor Co. by himself and succeed is still amazing to me."Kearns' tale is something Americans should take note of still, Kinnear says by phone from Atlanta."Its relevance today is kind of extraordinary," he says. "More and more of us work for fewer and fewer people and companies. ... Individuals in that kind of environment, the de facto result is that people are marginalized."In the world that we find ourselves in in 2008, it's just more and more difficult for an individual to be heard and certainly an individual to fight back. If a friend of yours said, 'I've got this issue with this Microsoft Corp., so I'm gonna take them to court,' you'd get them into a padded room as quickly as possible."(Contact Knoxville News Sentinel film critic Betsy Pickle at pickle(at)knews.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)