As everyone knows, Flight (Paramount, 11.2) is about a brilliant airline pilot getting raked over the coals and threatened with prison because he had booze in his system when he heroically saved his passengers from death. The metaphor, clearly, is about the nature of genius in all of its forms, including creative. The movie basically says “don’t fuck with creatives or you’ll look like an asshole.”

Geniuses roll how they roll. Geniuses make and live by their own rules. They don’t play the game like obedient little mice, and if you want geniuses to work for you or your company, you’re going to have to put up with their peculiarities and their crap.

Of course, most people in business, government and management refuse to understand this and are always trying to discipline geniuses for not playing by the rules and not behaving in a straight and narrow fashion. Most people, in short, are Salieris to the Mozarts in their realm. In this sense Flight is a kind of Hollywood metaphor — a big eff you to corporate owners and studio execs who think they’re running things and don’t realize they aren’t running anything — they’re just empty, egoistic, overpaid poseurs.

The people who really make this town tick are the geniuses, and so eff all the suits and officials who’ve ever made miserable the lives of the truly gifted, starting with Orson Welles back in the ’40s.