Opening Local File Works with urllib but not with urllib2

I'm trying to open a local file using urllib2. How can I go about doing this? When I try the following line with urllib:

resp = urllib.urlopen(url)

it works correctly, but when I switch it to:

resp = urllib2.urlopen(url)

I get:

ValueError: unknown url type: /path/to/file

where that file definitely does exit.

Thanks!