The first time we see Victoria Rogers in Barry Jenkins’s “If Beale Street Could Talk,” she stands solemn and alone on what appears to be a rooftop against the backdrop of a dusky sky. She doesn’t say a word. Instead, in voice-over, the film’s protagonist, Tish, introduces Victoria as the woman who has declared she was sexually assaulted by Fonny, Tish’s fiancé.

The scene doesn’t vilify Victoria, but it does present her in direct opposition to the movie’s adoring portrait of Tish and Fonny: After a beautiful, tender flashback to the couple’s first night together, a powerful expression of mutual love, there’s an abrupt tonal shift to Victoria’s scene, with the composer Nicholas Britell’s haunting score evoking a sense of ominousness and sorrow underneath her image. Tish’s voice-over is punctuated with pointed resentment toward Victoria.

She’s resentful because Fonny could not have been the assailant. As Tish explains, Fonny was at home with her and a friend at the time, far from Victoria’s attack. And a white police officer — who has had a menacing encounter with Fonny — seems to have coerced Victoria into the accusation. The officer, Bell, even claims to have seen Fonny running away.

The pervasiveness of injustice is a persistent theme of “Beale Street,” and it held firmly in my mind as I read, for the first time, the James Baldwin novel on which the movie is based, and, later, while I watched Jenkins’s adaptation, twice. The couple and their families pay dearly for the false accusation, and it wasn’t hard for me to connect their sense of injustice to the long and sordid history of black men falsely accused of rape (and often paying for it with their lives). It lingers right there in the text.