French twin filmmakers Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma adapt Nicolas Mathieu's acclaimed 2018 novel with great passion and a firm hand.

French writer Nicolas Mathieu won the Prix Goncourt — France’s most prestigious literary award — for his 2018 novel “And Their Children After Them,” a working-class Bildungsroman set against a backdrop of severe deindustrialization, for which he has cited his varied influences as including John Steinbeck, Émile Zola, Bruce Springsteen and the 2012 Jeff Nichols film “Mud.” Springsteen’s name is easily dismissed in this brash big-screen adaptation, via a thumpingly obvious needle drop as the bicycling hero straps his hands to some motorcycles and hits the open road. Mathieu’s more literary allusions, however, don’t survive the journey into Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma’s overlong, outwardly emotional but strangely unmoving film, which falls back on soap opera mechanics in its saga of three kids affected in different ways by a single, ill-advised act of teenage delinquency over a six-year period.

The Boukherma twins have shown an inventive, genre-bending verve in their first three features — most notably, “Teddy,” a kind of postmodern werewolf comedy starring a brilliant Anthony Bajon that made the official selection of the aborted 2020 Cannes edition. Big on scope and scale, with emotions that are writ large but don’t feel big, “And Their Children After Them” (more simply titled “Leurs enfants après eux,” minus that dangling opening slur, in the original French) feels like the brothers’ grand attempt at mainstream respectability. It could easily be a popular hit on its home turf, if not elsewhere, where Mathieu’s novel lacks the same cultural cachet. Venice has willingly boosted the Boukhermas’ auteurist stock with a competition slot for their latest, though the film makes them look a little inexperienced in that context.

In tone, subject matter and overall form, the film bears a coincidental resemblance to Gilles Lellouche's recently premiered Cannes film "Beating Hearts," another oversized, commercial teen melodrama that's out of place in major festival competition, though it's a little rougher around the edges. Like that film, the setting is an unnamed industrial town in eastern France, where once-thriving businesses have given way to widespread unemployment, while rusting factory skeletons loom large across the flat landscape.