The film stars an ensemble cast consisting of Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Dermot Mulroney, Julianne Nicholson, and Misty Upham as a dysfunctional family that reunites at the family home when their patriarch (Sam Shepard) suddenly disappears.

August: Osage County premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2013, and was released in North America on December 27, 2013.

The title designates time and location: an unusually hot August in a rural area outside Pawhuska, Oklahoma, 60 miles Northwest of Tulsa.

Beverly Weston, an alcoholic, once-noted poet, interviews and hires a young Cheyenne woman, Johnna, as a live-in cook and caregiver for his strong-willed and contentious wife Violet, who has oral cancer and an addiction to narcotics.

Youngest daughter Karen arrives with the latest in a string of boyfriends, Steve Huberbrecht, a sleazy Florida businessman whom she introduces as her fiancé.

Ivy confides to her sisters that she is in love with Little Charles, her cousin, who plans to move to New York, and that she cannot have children because she had a hysterectomy.

The family sits down to dinner after the funeral; fueled by drugs, Violet insults and embarrasses each person at the table under the guise of "truth-telling", which results in Barbara pouncing on her in a fit of anger.

Later, after Violet has had a chance to sober up, she has a tender moment with her daughters and shares a story that demonstrates how cruel her own mother was when she longed for a new pair of cowgirl boots when she was in her early teens.

Mattie Fae subsequently reveals to Barbara, who unintentionally listened in, that long ago she had an affair with Beverly, and Little Charles is in fact their younger half-brother as well as their cousin and that is the true reason why he and Ivy cannot be together.

She then gets back in the car and continues west, following signage showing highways and number of miles to Wichita, Salina, and Denver.

John Wells directed, while George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Jean Doumanian, and Steve Traxler produced the film.

The website's consensus reads: "The sheer amount of acting going on in August: Osage County threatens to overwhelm, but when the actors involved are as talented as Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, it's difficult to complain.