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The film Concussion, which stars Will Smith as Dr. Bennett Omalu, was released this weekend. The film explores Dr. Omalu's discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and his efforts to prove its existence to the NFL, among other things.

As the film is "fact-based," there are obviously real people represented throughout. One of those people is Dave Duerson, who was a defensive back for the Chicago Bears, New York Giants and Arizona Cardinals that took his own life in February 2011 and was found to have suffered CTE. Once his playing career was over, Duerson also served as a player representative on the panel that considered retired players' claims.

Duerson's family is not happy with the way he was portrayed in the film. Duerson's son, Tregg, told the New York Times recently that, "They (the film makers) completely made up stuff."

The Duerson family asserts that at least two scenes in the film that portray Duerson in a negative light never happened. (MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)

The first is a scene in which Dr. Omalu is stopped by Duerson from entering a medical conference, and is then called a quack (by Duerson) and told to go back to Africa and "get away from our game." The family says it never happened.

The second scene, per the Times:

Another scene that the Duerson family considers manufactured shows a standoff between Duerson and Andre Waters, a former player whose application for benefits was denied by a retiree board that included Duerson. Waters surprises Duerson outside NFL headquarters, where Duerson dismisses his plea.

"Got a headache?" Duerson asks Waters. "See a doctor."

In the next scene, a newspaper report notes that Waters committed suicide at 44, seeming to suggest that Waters’s death could have been prevented if Duerson had been more compassionate with a fellow player.

"What the movie doesn't appreciate was how difficult a position he was in," Tregg Duerson said. "You have someone on a board with a fiduciary responsibility who can't just give out dollars for the sake of giving out dollars. I think his hands were tied."

Former NFL running back Robert Smith, who served on that committee with Duerson, also has taken issue with the film on Twitter.

For his part, director Peter Landesman said that while the film is not necessarily 100 percent factually accurate, it is thematically accurate.

"As we were making a feature film and not a documentary, and it's not a Wikipedia entry, people go to movies not to digest information and data but to have an emotional experience," Landesman said. "The movie is emotionally and spiritually accurate all the way through."

Most "based on a true story" film are not 100 percent factually accurate, but that practice gets a bit sticky if real people are made to do things in the film that they did not do in real life. That's especially true if those things paint them in a negative light.

Landesman, though, considers Duerson a crucial character to express the themes explored by the film, even if not all his actions are 100 percent based in reality.

"Dave Duerson serves a very crucial metaphorical purpose -- not just a player who retires and becomes part of the NFL superstructure and goes from wearing a uniform to a suit, but a man who then sits there in judgment of other players when they deserve disability payments," Landesman said. "Then, at the end of the day, he takes his own life in the name of this disease which ravaged a lot of the men that he said no to and finds himself in the ironic position of suffering from the same fate."

The movie 'Concussion' has received backlash. (USATSI)
The movie 'Concussion' has received backlash. (USATSI)