For three decades, Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been making honest character studies in an emotionally direct, socially conscious, and naturalistic style, usually with nonprofessional actors. The brothers’ latest, set in a state-run maternity home in Liège, follows five underprivileged teenagers who have either recently given birth or are about to.

This quintet comprises Jessica (Babette Verbeek), who is pregnant with her first child and wants to meet her biological mother, Morgane (India Hair), for the first time while hoping she will not follow in Morgane’s footsteps and abandon her own child. Perla (Lucie Laruelle) tries to balance her relationships with her newborn and the baby’s father, Robin (Gunter Duret), who has just been released from prison and wants to break up. Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan) is dealing with her mother, Nathalie (Christelle Cornil), who argued against an abortion and is now upset that Ariane wants to give her baby to a foster family. Julie (Elsa Houben), struggling with substance abuse, at least has a steady influence in her partner and the baby’s father, Dylan (Jef Jacobs). Then there’s Naïma (Samia Hilmi), who’s about to leave the shelter with what looks like a solid job prospect.

As usual with the Dardennes, the verisimilitude is so plain and unadorned that it seems almost like intimate eavesdropping on real lives. There are several sequences of tearful truthfulness, whether it is Perla being unable to perform the everyday baby care that—as one woman who assists at the home points out—is the bare minimum for survival, or Ariane hearing from a prospective foster couple that they will teach the child how to play a musical instrument, something she could never imagine experiencing in her own upbringing.

Since the film skips around so much among these young women, who do not have much interaction with one another, there is a certain lack of dramatic propulsion, especially since the stories of hope and disappointment, happiness and frustration are similar for four of them. After all, these teenagers have been thrust into adulthood at too young an age and occasionally make wrongheaded or immature decisions. Naïma, the lone unadorned success story, seems shoehorned into the picture to provide a semblance of positive reinforcement, as she has much less screen time than everyone else.

Young Mothers displays the filmmakers’ customary rigor when working with newcomers: The credits list 33(!) babies who play the five onscreen infants. And the performances are mostly acute and focused, especially Verbeek, who plays Jessica with a formidable naturalness, and Laruelle, who makes Perla a simultaneously affecting and irritating combination of child and adult. Even at their most schematic, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne dramatize the harshness of these girls’ lives without sentimentality or condescension.