Will Smith stars in “Concussion” as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who, after emigrating to the U.S. from Nigeria, was a pioneer in identifying degenerative brain disease in American football players. For worse and better, this Sony production, which was written and directed by Peter Landesman, is a mainstream studio movie—worse because many of its faults and annoying banalities flow from the sort of clumsy script that afflicts many studio movies these days, and better precisely because the movie’s Hollywood provenance may bring its important subject to a mainstream audience.  Mr. Landesman’s adaptation of “Game Brain,” a GQ article by Jeanne Marie Laskas, starts with Dr. Omalu’s autopsy of Mike Webster (played in harrowing flashbacks by David Morse), the former center for the Pittsburgh Steelers whose death came after many years of cognitive impairment and emotional tumult. At first the pathologist’s tissue analysis looks normal, but then he sees something new. “My God, my God,” he says to Prema Mutiso (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a nurse from Nairobi who will become his wife. It’s one of those faux-dramatic moments that doesn’t quite make sense, since that’s all he says to her in the scene, even though she’s in the same room watching him peer through his microscope. Only later does he describe what he’s seen as killer proteins that function in the brain “like pouring wet concrete down kitchen pipes,” then publish his discoveries in a paper that becomes the bane of the National Football League.  The relationship between Bennet and Prema is conventional; intelligent and accomplished as they both are, she’s basically there to stand by her man and cheer him on. But the great strength of “Concussion” is its star’s performance. Meticulous in his accent and grave in his demeanor, Mr. Smith makes Bennet charmingly eccentric (the doctor talks tenderly to his corpses before cutting them up); quick to detect casual racism (his detractors call him “mister” or nothing at all, rather than Dr. Omalu); and, for someone with a self-declared interest “in the science of death,” a vivid advocate for the lives of imperiled athletes.
Will Smith stars in the story of a doctor who brought attention to brain trauma in football players and became the bane of the NF