French writer Nicolas Mathieu won the Prix Goncourt — France’s highest-profile 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 stated his disparate influences to include John Steinbeck, Émile Zola, Bruce Springsteen and the 2012 Jeff Nichols film “Mud.” The Springsteen namecheck is easily taken care of in this brash big-screen adaptation, via a thuddingly obvious needle-drop as its bike-riding hero straps his hands across some engines and hits the open road. Mathieu’s more literary allusions, however, haven’t survived the journey to Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma‘s overlong, outwardly emotive but strangely unmoving film,
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