Starring Will Smith. Rated 14A.

Taken from the 2009 GQ article, and later book, by Jeanne Marie Laskas, Concussion keeps its focus on Nigerian-born Bennet Omalu, a Pittsburgh pathologist who encountered life-wrecking injuries among ex-footballers, and later named the syndrome chronic traumatic encephalopathy—a reality that the NFL, aided by the FBI and other agencies, worked hard to bury.

The best thing about the film is Will Smith’s relatively complete submersion into the role of Omalu. The worst thing about it is writer-director Peter Landesman’s insistence on the nobility of his main character. In truth, there was little personal virtue required of this particular whistle blower, other than patience and outsider status, unenraptured by American sports. But the script keeps pushing his saintliness, and the profundity of his aspiration to the now-fading American Dream.

Mostly shot in dark blues and browns, the two-hour film is packed with intense close-ups, jerky edits, and overblown music; peering into a microscope has never looked more dramatic. But this welter of useless style is largely to compensate for a dull, repetitive script that does little to fill in procedural steps before Omalu’s inevitable vindication.

Concussion doesn’t exactly go soft on the NFL, which it rightly compares to Big Tobacco in shameless cover-up techniques. But it’s padded with too many scenes depicting the good doctor’s kibitzy relationship with his mentor (energetic Albert Brooks) and passionless connection to his Kenyan fiancée (an overly polished Gugu Mbatha-Raw). So viewers, and not just retired footballers, can all too easily forget what the movie’s even about.