pull records that are inactive
a company may have both an inactive and an active account in M


SO I assume it can be only one active and one inactive row. Here is a solution with JOINs only. If there can be multiple (active) rows, you should use EXISTS instead, as @ypercube already mentioned in his comment.

SELECT R.*, M1.active
FROM   R
JOIN   M AS M1 ON M1.company = R.company
              AND M1.account = R.account
              AND M1.active  = 'inactive'
LEFT   JOIN M AS M2 ON M2.company = R.company
                   AND M2.account = R.account -- or no active account at all?
                   AND M2.active  = 'active'
WHERE  M2.company IS NULL;


As @ypercube commented: it did not become entirely clear whether you don't want any active account to invalidate the company or just a matching active account.

I went with matching account in my query. Remove AND M2.account = R.account from the JOIN condition if you want any.