Will Smith's new movie "Concussion" is hitting hard on the National Football League. The actor plays the role of a doctor who discovers that injuries from football can cause encephalopathy.

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Based on a true story, Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian-born forensic pathologist who discovered through autopsies that football players can develop a neurodegenerative disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Omalu found out that several deceased players including Hall of Famer Mike Webster suffered from CTE. The condition results from repeated brain trauma and over time can cause dementia, behavioral changes, and depression.

The doctor became at odds with the NFL after diagnosing football players such as Andre Waters (Richard T. Jones) and Dave Duerson (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).

The movie also stars Alec Baldwin, Luke Wilson, Albert Brooks, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. The film is directed by Peter Landesman.

The director describes Omalu as someone with a savant-like relationship with the dead.

"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," Landesman told Sports Illustrated.

"Concussion" hits theaters on Dec. 25.

Tagsconcussion, Will Smith, NFL, Dr. Bennet Omalu