In an Oscar season not wanting for controversy, Green Book made headlines as one of the most divisive Best Picture nominees. It’s a feel-good film about healing the wounds of racism that’s seen not one, but two racism controversies—first when star Viggo Mortensen dropped the n-bomb during a Q&A, and then when co-writer Nick Vallelonga’s Islamophoic tweet surfaced.

These controversies are symptomatic of the film itself, a based-on-a-true-story white savior road trip movie that uses fried chicken as its leitmotif. While Mortensen and his co-star Mahershala Ali both turn in fantastic performances, casting is pretty much the only thing the film gets right. In its handling of everything from the biography of one of the men at the heart of the film to the very nature of American racism, Green Book stumbles.

The movie is a classic road story, telling the tale of Bronx bouncer Tony Vallelonga (Mortensen), who in 1962 found work serving as chauffeur and bodyguard for Dr. Donald Shirley (Ali), a queer black composer undertaking a dangerous concert tour through the South. (Under his nickname, Tony Lip, the one-time bouncer would go on to be a successful actor, best known playing Lupertazzi family boss Carmine on The Sopranos.) In the film, Tony teaches the staid classical musician to loosen up; Doc, as Tony calls him, in turn teaches his driver to be less racist.

It's saccharine and predictable to the core, and it took home three Golden Globes, including Best Picture. It was up for five more trophies—including Best Picture, Best Actor for Mortensen, Best Supporting Actor for Ali, and Best Original Screenplay—at Sunday's Academy Awards. Ultimately, the film took home the Best Picture honor as well as Best Original Screenplay; Ali won Best Supporting Actor.

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But the film’s first sin is right in its name. It takes its title from the Negro Travelers' Green Book, and yet gives this important piece of American history little screen time or analysis. The Green Book was an annual guide published by Victor Hugo Green and his family between 1936 and 1966, and listed hotels, gas stations, and restaurants around the nation that would be hospitable to black visitors. Thousands of copies were sold each year to black travelers well aware that even the most innocent of road trips left them prey to racist humiliations ranging from refusal of service to outright violence.

In the film, Tony flicks through the book a few times before landing Doc in some fairly seedy motels, something experts have pointed out as being inaccurate as the real Green Book often guided travelers to higher-end locations. The film also suggests that the advice offered in Green's guide would only be necessary in the South, when in fact the book began as a pamphlet suggesting hospitable businesses in the author's native New York.

It's not the film's only misleading depiction of racism. In one scene, a Southern lawman pulls over Tony and Doc's car at night to run the pair out of town, warning that they were in a "sundown town"—a community that didn't allow black people to stay after nightfall. "Sundown towns were incredibly rare in the South," expert James W. Loewen told Politifact. "White southerners thought sundown towns were stupid—who would be the maid?"

There has also been debate surrounding the accuracy of the film’s depiction of the two men. Both are portrayed as broad stereotypes; Tony's a Bronx tough guy with a disposition toward occasional violence who's often seen wearing undershirts. Doc is absurdly uptight, haughty to the point of rudeness and quick to offer grammatical corrections. While Tony’s real-life son Nick Vallelonga co-wrote Green Book—and could presumably have vetoed, say, the scene in which his dad folds an entire pizza in half and chows down—Dr. Shirley’s family had no such opportunity to inform their relative’s portrayal; they weren’t consulted at all, and have condemned the film as inaccurate.

Universal Pictures

Shirley’s surviving brother, Dr. Maurice Shirley, called the film a "symphony of lies" in an interview with Shadow and Act. The movie portrays Dr. Shirley, who like his former driver died in 2013, as a man whose education and refinements place him at odds with the black community. He’s indifferent to black music and ill-at-ease around other African-Americans. "I’m not accepted by my own people, because I’m not like them," Doc says at one point in the film. His character is extremely isolated, and the only mention his family receives is a reference to a sole estranged brother.

But in 1962, Shirley in fact had three living brothers, and his family says that during the tour portrayed in the film he was in regular contact with them. Not only that, but the family insists that Shirley was deeply embedded in the black community. He participated in the Civil Rights movement and was friends with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—who was the occasional patient of Shirley’s brother, the physician Dr. Edwin Shirley. He was friends with Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan, and an attendee of Dr. King’s March on Selma.

The real-life Tony Vallelonga. Both he and Shirley died in 2013.

"The character so superbly played by Mahershala Ali was simply not the Uncle Donald I knew," Edwin Shirley wrote in an email to Time. "They made a commercially successful, a popular movie, but in the process, distorted and diminished the life of one of the two main characters. They’ve impaired the integrity of Donald Shirley’s life with events and innuendoes that just run counter to the man I knew."

One of the film’s greatest inaccuracies lies in its portrayal of racism as the result of the individual ignorances of underexposed white Americans, rather than a systematic structure of purposeful inequity. Here, race hate in white Northerners is a peccadillo that quickly scuttles away in the face of black genius. Over the course of the film, Tony evolves from being a bigot who initially throws out water glasses simply because black handymen drank from them to being a man who—spoiler alert!—invites Doc to his home for Christmas dinner. He found it within himself to acknowledge the humanity of a man who was clearly his professional and intellectual superior, but we never discover what he now thinks of the handymen.

And in a film that pursues a facile message of racial harmony, one of its most bigoted undercurrents is its suggestion that Shirley’s refinements render him somehow alien to the black community. In fact, each of Shirley’s three brothers were also doctors, and 1960s America was home to a thriving black upper class filled with people who spoke multiple languages and loved classical music. Though Dr. Shirley was certainly more talented than all but a few of his contemporaries, the film’s insistence that a black man who appreciates well-tailored suits, speaks Italian, and is fond of French Opera was something akin to a UFO is its most insidious suggestion of all.

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