A Complete Unknown and Toshi Seeger

The New Bob Dylan Biopic Through an Asian American Looking Glass

By Roy Nakano

Director James Mangold’s new film, A Complete Unknown, the biopic about Bob Dylan’s early years leading up to his 1965 performance at the Newport Folk Festival, is generating a lot of buzz in the press. Much of it is about what the film got right and wrong from actual history.

The title comes from a line in “Like A Rolling Stone”—one of the songs Dylan performed with electric guitars at the festival. However, for many viewers, “a complete unknown” could also describe the prominent inclusion of music activist, musicologist, producer and filmmaker Toshi Seeger in the film (played by actress Eriko Hatsune).

Toshi Seeger’s prominence is certainly justifiable. Her husband Pete Seeger took Dylan under his wing in the singer-songwriter’s early days. In the film, she’s portrayed as the head of the Seeger household where Dylan is invited to stay over. Toshi Seeger helped set up the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s. Toshi was also the producer and director of Pete Seeger’s public television show Rainbow Quest, which plays a key role in the film.  

Still, Toshi Seeger’s inclusion in the film took me by surprise. I’m used to Asian American roles being excluded from films. Back in the old days, it was white actors in yellowface (The Good Earth, Charlie Chan, the Fu Manchu series, Breakfast at Tiffany’s). In more recent times, the Asian roles were re-written so that white actors could portray the roles (Kung Fu, The Last Samurai, The Last Airbender, The Martian, Aloha, Dr. Strange, Ghost in the Shell). Or the characters would be erased altogether, as happened with Yuri Kochiyama’s role of cradling Malcom X after assassins gunned him down in the Audubon Ballroom in 1965 (Spike Lee’s Malcolm X). 

While A Complete Unknown is applauded for not eliminating Toshi Seeger out of the film, some argue it could have provided more dialogue for her role. Writer and occasional standup comedian Merrill Markoe asks in her blog Still looking for the Joke, “Why are we seeing so much of a character who never speaks a word? If she is not important enough to have any lines, why is she also so omnipresent in the movie? Is she meant to seem like kind of a Yoko Ono presence…attached at the hip to a great man? Why is she in EVERY important scene in this damn movie, but never given ANYTHING to say?”

Towards the end of the film, Eriko Hatsune’s Toshi does play a critical role in the story. That aside, I got the impression she was being portrayed as sort of a quiet warrior—like James Colburn as the knife expert Britt in The Magnificant Seven (which itself was inspired by Seiji Miyaguchi’s role as the master swordsman-of-few-words Kyuzo in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai). Despite being one of the stars in The Magnificent Seven, James Colburn reportedly had a total of only 11 lines in the film. 

Writer and musician Edward Renehan, Jr. commented on Markoe’s blog, “Toshi was nothing like depicted in the film. I knew Pete and Toshi very well for more than 40 years…Toshi was a force of nature. She was not an adoring Stepford wife. She was, in fact, Pete’s highly influential and very active co-manager along with Harold Leventhal. She was brilliant, and she took no prisoners. She called a spade a spade. And she was the consummate organizer.”

So, was Toshi Seeger accurately portrayed in A Complete Unknown? Maybe not, but at least she was portrayed. Sadly, Suze Rotolo, arguably the most significant female friend in Bob Dylan’s musical life, didn’t get the same recognition in the film. Rotolo’s name was changed to Sylvie Russo. Evidently, Director Mangold was honoring a request by Dylan to not use Rotolo’s name in the movie. 

As for the movie itself, your enjoyment may depend on how much you like Bob Dylan’s music. My family will tell you I’m a fan of his music. In our back room, there’s a wall covered with his early albums. My first electric car had the license plate JUL 25 65 (the day Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival and was booed off the stage) along with a frame that read “Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm.” To me, the movie was like a giant music video with a storyline weaving together each song. The actors played their parts in a believable fashion. They also did a remarkable job of playing and singing the songs of Dylan, Baez and Seeger. 

I expect this movie to introduce a new generation of listeners to Bob Dylan’s music. But maybe it’ll also change the status of Toshi Seeger—from being a complete unknown to being acknowledged as the one who not only helped set up the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s and produced the television series Rainbow Quest in the mid-1960s, but one who also co-founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and the Great Hudson River Revival, was an Emmy-winning PBS documentarian, helped bring groundbreaking artists into the public eye such as Mississippi John Hurt and Tracy Chapman, and was one of the very small handful of Asian Americans taking part in the historic 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. 

With a bit of luck, there will be a film about Toshi Seeger in our lifetime. 

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