The narrative follows the strong-willed daughters returning home after their father’s death, with Meryl Streep’s Violet as the pill-addicted matriarch and Julia Roberts’s Barbara as the combative eldest daughter; these female roles arise organically from the semi-autobiographical source material about Letts’s own family experiences rather than any activist framing. Casting consists of an all-white ensemble of established stars (Streep, Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Cooper) with no race- or gender-swapping of prior characters.

The sole Native American figure, Johnna the Cheyenne housekeeper, appears briefly as a practical hire in a county with a real Native population and serves no thematic or identity-politics function. No dialogue, subplots, or creator statements address systemic oppression, DEI mandates, or critiques of traditional norms; Letts has repeatedly described the work as personal and observational about addiction and family dysfunction.