[2] The story focuses on Robert Kearns (played by Greg Kinnear) and his legal battle against the Ford Motor Company after they developed an intermittent windshield wiper based on ideas the inventor had patented.

[1] On his wedding night in 1953, an errant champagne cork renders Detroit college engineering professor Robert Kearns almost completely blind in his left eye.

With financial support from Gil Previck, Kearns converts his basement into a laboratory and develops a prototype he tests in a fish tank before installing it in his car.

Frustrated, Kearns attends a Ford dealers convention at which the latest model of the Mustang is unveiled, promoting the intermittent wiper as a selling point.

Realizing the company has used his idea without giving him credit or payment for it, Kearns begins his descent into a despair so deep he boards a Greyhound bus and heads for Washington, D.C., where he apparently hopes to find legal recourse.

Finally released when doctors decide his obsession has subsided, he returns home a broken man, determined to receive public acknowledgement for his accomplishment.

Marc Abraham, who previously had produced The Road to Wellville (1994), Air Force One (1997), and Children of Men (2006), among many films, had long been drawn to the Robert Kearns saga for his directorial debut because the inventor believed more in fairness and honesty than the money offered to make him drop his lawsuit.

"[3] He submitted numerous revisions of the screenplay to Universal Studios chief Stacey Snider, who repeatedly told him, "This is not an easy script, and he's not a likable guy".

[citation needed] The scene when Ford's new line of cars with the intermittent wiper is shown for the first time was shot in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The website's consensus reads, "The touching underdog story of a single guy against a massive corporation, Flash of Genius is a well-paced and well-written tale with a standout performance by star Greg Kinnear.

He added, "Flash of Genius would have been more gripping had it pinpointed events and conveyed the harrowing physical, emotional and financial cost of Kearns’s quest".

[9] Todd McCarthy of Variety agreed with Olsen and Holden, describing the film as "very small potatoes in the cinematic annals of inspiring little-guy-fights-the-system melodramas, to the point that it's a wonder it was thought to be strong bigscreen material; an old-style TV movie would have been more like it".

He continued, "Marc Abraham has made a movie much like the Will Smith-as-plucky-homeless-guy drama The Pursuit of Happyness, where two hours of suffering may or may not lead to a single triumphant moment.