Football is a pastime, football is a lifestyle, football is, arguably, the best it's ever been. Football is also a threat to the men who submit to it. But could the risks of brain trauma curb America's appetite for the sport? Maybe if Will Smith gets involved.

In the new film Concussion, Smith stars as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian-born neuropathologist who, after performing autopsies on several deceased players (including Pro Hall of Famer Mike Webster), connected chronic traumatic encephalopathy to injuries sustained from football. Dr. Julian Bailes, played by Alec Baldwin in the film, sums it up for Smith's Omalu in the first trailer for the film: "You turned on the lights and gave their biggest boogeyman a name." As depicted in the film, Omalu's discovery opened up a can of worms for NFL, which would love us to forget the conclusions and go back to rooting for our favorite teams. Smith's feature version presents the true story as a present day David versus Goliath. In an interview with Sports Illustrated, Concussion director Peter Landesman tries to explain his main character's persistence.

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"Bennett has a savant-like relationship to the dead," Landesman tells SI. "His obsession is to tell the story of death. As he says in the movie, I think more about the way people die and reasons they die than the way they live. He was completely focused on the science. He didn't know football, he didn't know who Mike Webster was; to him, Webster was just another body on a slab. He didn't have a reverence for the game because he wasn't brought up in this country. So in some ways, his purity and his innocence was a requirement for him to drill down into this and tell us a very uncomfortable and inconvenient truth."

Concussion hits theaters on December 25.

Matt Patches Senior Writer Patches is a Senior Writer at Esquire.com.

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