Brothers Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma adapt Nicolas Mathieu’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel about an awkward blue-collar kid observed over four summers.

If you’ve spent time in towns in the far-flung provinces of any number of European countries — particularly ones in which mills that supplied the economic lifeblood of working-class communities have closed, leaving inhabitants adrift without a raft — chances are you’ll recognize the fictional Northeastern French setting of And Their Children After Them (Leurs enfants aprés eux). These are places stuck in time, usually around the point when their industries were shuttered. That fossilization can be observed at public celebrations where the locals mob the dance floor when the cheesiest of Euro-pop relics are blasted over the speakers, in this case Boney M.’s “Rivers of Babylon.”

Emerging actor Paul Kircher, who turned heads in Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy and Thomas Cailley’s The Animal Kingdom, plays awkward introvert Anthony, who’s 14 when we first meet him. Wearing a leather motorcycle jacket in sweltering heat, possibly because he believes it gives him a bit of cool swagger, he flicks a cigarette in the lake then grumbles to his cousin (Louis Memmi) that the water is too gross for swimming.

Steph and Clémence invite them to a party that night at a friend’s place too far outside the town center of Heillange, where they live, to go on bicycles. Anthony’s cousin prods him to “borrow” the precious motorbike his father Patrick (Gilles Lellouche) keeps under a cover in the garage. Anthony has enough experience to know how it would inflame his hot-tempered alcoholic dad, even without the warning of his careworn mother Hélène (Ludivine Sagnier, terrific), but he sneaks off on the Yamaha anyway. That turns out not to be the only impulsive decision that will reverberate across the story’s six-year span.

It’s obvious the minute they get to the party that rich folks’ houses are a foreign land to them. When he’s left alone after his unintimidated cousin is whisked off by Clémence, Anthony mopes around getting progressively drunker and wobblier. But he jumps on an opportunity to try to impress Steph when Moroccan kid Hacine (Sayyid El Alami) and his friend are told they’re not welcome at the conspicuously white party. Hacine kicks over a barbecue on the way out, almost hitting Steph, and Anthony humiliates him by sticking out a foot to trip him.

That spur-of-the-moment act is the other trigger for a domino effect of anger, retaliation and violence affecting Anthony and his family, as well as Hacine and his father Malek (Lounès Tazaïrt).

The writer-directors follow the novel in making Anthony the focus, which leaves Hacine feeling short-changed, particularly since El Alami, with his brooding good looks and fiery eyes, is a compelling presence. His entry into the local drug trade, for instance, comes up once and is never mentioned again, though the filmmakers’ decision to contain events within the four summers makes it inevitable that the audience will be left to fill in some gaps.

Interwoven with the acts of aggression between them are threads tracing the dissolution of Anthony’s family and the poignant string of disappointments that keep Steph just out of reach. Over and over, opportunities for connection are narrowly missed, including an attempt at rapprochement with his son by Patrick — who morphs gradually from a snarling brute into a wreck of a man, conveyed with a lot of pathos and a little heavy-handedness by Lellouche in moving scenes toward the end.

The “almost” aspect of the story is felt most acutely in Anthony’s efforts to get close to Steph. She’s played by the captivating Woreth as a young woman who, despite her more comfortable middle-class upbringing, has her own problems and insecurities, which are perhaps what give her an affinity with Anthony and keep her from rejecting him outright.